


All the Stars

by BlueWay



Category: Halo (Video Games) & Related Fandoms, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2, Military, Novelization, ODST Orbital Drop Shock Trooper(s), SPARTAN-III, Slow Burn, The Reaper War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-01-16 01:55:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 29
Words: 525,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21263195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueWay/pseuds/BlueWay
Summary: When the Long Night of Solace is evaporated over Reach via the weaponized usage of a Slipspace Drive, it ferries with it in its swallowed sections the Covenant Empire and, more horrifyingly, the desperate measures that the UNSC used to fight them. When they are found in a universe on the precipice of their own history, the meaning of the term "Mass Effect" will change forever.





	1. 0-1: A Risk of Rain

**Section 0-1: A Risk of Rain**

* * *

_ **SPARTAN-B312** _

_ **The Woman with only One Equal** _

_ **The Lone Wolf** _

* * *

It was in the process of killing a few dozen aliens, with gunfire and plasma bolts around, that a stray shot had given someone the death sentence, not by hitting flesh, but rather hitting a slipspace drive.

The indicator come up as red, the firing mechanism fried. Any notion that this could be left to automation thrown out the airlock along with any hope that this war would've ended anytime soon. The hulking beast of a man, clad in armor worth about as much as the bomb before him, had been displeasured, but accepting. Someone needed to pull the trigger, and he was designed and raised to be an expendable asset.

Though anyone with a death wish would've thought the same, that their death would've meant something more than sacrifice, no matter how useful it ended up being. For here he was, over his homeworld. One of the very few of his flock, if not the only one, who could've said that they at least remained where they were born.

He counted his lucky stars in that way. Funny, he thought internally. It was usually John that had been the one who was lucky. Lucky meant that he had made it, somehow, in the life that was given to him, 41 years of age. 41 was enough, if this was how it was going to be.

"So it's going to be like that…"

He smacked the side of the interface device with his gloved hand, the sound of metal reverberating lightly as he turned to see the only person who had survived the firefight to protect this hunk of technology.

Even at a six foot nine, she wasn't as tall as him. Even with the bio augmentations and the armor, there was a "generational" difference between her and him. Still, they stood as equals in some way, and so he spoke frankly to her.

"Well I've got good news and bad news." The Spartan III, listening, tilted her helmet clad head at the Spartan II. "The bird took some fire and our thruster gimble is toast, which means the only way off this slag heap, is gravity."

"And the good news?" She finally spoke. Her voice was husky, leaning on low, but still distinctly feminine.

The man grimaced behind his helmet. "That _was_ the good news."

A female robotic voice in both their heads spoke up through their armor's audio system. "At current velocity, fifty three seconds to interdict."

The AI wasn't about to be one of the last voices he heard, Jorge decided, sliding off his helmet, showing a face not many, either alien or human, would've ever seen. Scars, gruff facial hair, a jaw line beaten too many times by explosives and the fists of aliens that were as enigma to humanity now as they had been for decades. The helmets that they wore had become so much a part of their identity, that those that wore them made a language shared between them all, expressing what their absent faces could not.

A rugged face, manly, seen this war dragged on too long and in the wrong direction. The helmet clattered at his feet, no use, no need.

"Bad news is, timer's fried. I'm going to have to fire it manually."

"That's a one way trip." There was urgency behind her voice that was almost as if she was asking him if he knew what he was saying.

"We all make it sooner or later." Spoken like a person who had been on death's doorstep and peered in too many times before inviting himself in. "Better get going Six, they're going to need you down there."

He went for his dog tags. Due to the nature of his existence they only showed two things, the rest punched Xs. His name was Jorge, and his service number was horrifyingly less than the amount of casualties in this war, civilian and participant. He would've yanked it from his neck, given it to the new Spartan before him, and signed away his death for a meaningful sacrifice to beat back an invasion of his home. He wanted to go out like this. He would've.

"Jorge." "Six" spoke, punctuation in her voice. "This shouldn't be your last fight. You're more of a Spartan than me. If I die the UNSC just loses a bad follow up act."

She was a mass production model; an imitation, of the beast before her. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and so they found people like her to fill in the shoes of those that came before her. There were a reason the casualty rates for Spartan III operations often were 100%.

"I've gotten too old, Six, too attached. Too human. Halsey never designed us for this. This was what we were made to do." A tired man. Tired they were all. "Look at my face." He ran his hand across his face. "Please, let me have this victory. _Reach has been good to me_."

He wasn't a coward, this Six knew. But there was pleading in his voice that came from the very depths of humanity, from a man who had been in the thick of it, and saw no end to the abyss.

"I wish I could Jorge. But you know it's not your call. Your true mission lies ahead, in taking this fight to the Covenant with the rest of the Spartan IIs. _**This **_is what I was made for Jorge."

Noble Six. That was the title she was given for the duration of her stay on Reach. She had no name (none that weren't platitudes, reasonably), just code names and designations meant for command to make it easier to order her places, and push her and whatever unit she was in around the map, around the stars. "Hyper Lethal" Is what the ONI Spooks designated in her file, she knew. A title shared with a Spartan II whom she never knew and, in some small part of her mind, figured was a propaganda play. She came to be a Spartan III because she wanted to kill Covenant, and so if it meant that this was how she was going to go out, by practical, efficient reasoning between her and Jorge, she too was okay dying today.

"Don't deny me this, Six." Jorge reached his hand, to hoist her up, but Six shuffled back in her armor, hand also out to stop that movement.

"I won't deny you a _**future**_, Jorge. To see Reach after this war. An after you will help bring. You were made to win this war. I'm here to _**die**_ in it."

"Thirty seconds to end point." The AI in both their heads had reminded them again.

Two Spartans stood, wanting to be the one to die today, both unmoving, both unwilling.

"Six…" Jorge said breathlessly. It was her chains that were broken, her dog tags coming into her hand.

All she could do in response was hurriedly scurry for his helmet, shoving it into his chest along with her dog tags as she assumed the position in front of the bomb. "Go Jorge! _**Go Home!**_" She didn't even look at him, but the decision was made in that instance. It was the difference in training between the IIs and the IIIs, and even by Spartan standards, one was made to understand that being expendable was a privilege, and going out with a bang was the best thing they could all hope for.

If she did look, she would've seen the pain written on Jorge's face: for him to witness another dead Noble Six, another dead Noble, another dead Spartan. Time, indeed, had gone too long for him. It never got easy, but he got used to it as his helmet slid on again.

"Besides," she regarded him for the last time, hands white knuckled beneath her armored grip against the slipspace drive and its jury rigged arming device in the boot of the Pelican. She hoped he was too far away and already out the hangar to hear, but he had stayed till the last second, not wanting to fight a Spartan for the right to die today. _**"Spartans never die."**_

Whether it was for herself, or for him, Jorge understood in a solemn nod. "Make it count."

The small blip of an energy barrier parting as Jorge slipped out of that alien ship was the cue Six needed to know that Jorge did the right thing and left her. A breath she was holding behind her helmet was let go, filling the filters, letting go every grievance she had within her as she faced her own finality. She'd been this close before, and now she was going there willingly as she gave Jorge time to get out of range.

"Fifteen seconds to end point."

If she were more stoic, more a romantic, she would've taken off her helmet, looked out of the hangar and looked upon Reach once more. To see one last jewel of humanity before she extinguished herself.

"Auntie Dot?" She breathed, teeth shaking, leg jittering, eyes closed as her fingers drifted to the buttons she needed to press to ignite this Trojan horse.

The AI in her head answered obediently. "Yes Noble Six?"

"If there's anything left of my body, make sure they bury me with my mother."

"Noted. Five seconds to end point."

She breathed in, breathed out, opened her eyes and saw it all ready. She was ready to step over. She smiled, barring her teeth like fangs from a wolf about to eat.

**"Sayonara."**

The abyss had come out and swallowed her, and then she saw the light.

* * *

**ODST 11282-31220-JD**

**The man who would have become known as**

**The Rookie**

* * *

A flip of the coin decided his fate. It was either be transferred to the UNSC Chares, or the UNSC Savannah. He chose heads, and thus a few months ago he came to be deployed on the Savannah in station over Reach awaiting orders for new offensives (unlikely) or fast responses to colonies under siege.

He never thought he'd end up deploying on Reach: humanity's fortress world, a skip away from Earth. He never thought he'd also be boarding a Covenant ship that was to be used as a Trojan horse to blow up a Super Carrier, a suicide mission that would've ended the seemingly endless fighting groundside. He'd been dropped from in his pod at least five times since the Winter Contingency was called.

Quite frankly the last two weeks had been surprising to him, but he was one of the Corps' best, if only by association with the group he was in. He wasn't green (no ODST ever is), but he had no reason to survive the Elite standing over him, all four jaws open with teeth bared and an energy sword about to halve him as its foot clamped down on one leg of his. If he moved for his M6S Pistol, the Elite would've chopped off the last few seconds it had given him to gloat over the kill that it was about to perform, and he wanted those seconds. So he did nothing, held his breath, and only wished to die with both his eyes open shooting daggers at his killer.

He didn't talk much. Didn't need to. He was strong, so he could afford to be silent. Though in his mind, he figured that maybe final words were due in this situation, perhaps.

He didn't even finish the final quip in his mind before the ship lurched, a blinding flash of black and white encompassing them both as the hallway they were in, adorned with dead ODSTs and other Covenant, vibrated as if coming apart.

It was a surprise the Elite was knocked off balance, and the trapped man seized the element and went for his pistol. The huge alien with its blue combat armor had tried to balance on one leg in the shifting and wobbling of the world around them, the groans of that of textbook instability, but the ODST had made it to his feet and sweeped the Elite, knocking the energy sword out of its hands by liberally applying 12.7 millimeter rounds to its forearms, its shields breaking and giving way to the metal and flesh. The pop of the shield was the sound like harmony in that ever chaotic world, and it only took a few steps back for the ODST to activate the aim assist built into the VISR of his helmet and aim right between the eyes of that alien son of a bitch.

Somewhere between then and the time it took the ship to stop feeling like it was shaking apart, there was another dead Elite on the floor and one extra bullet casing along with it: the lone survivor of that fight unbelieving, letting go of the breath he didn't know he was holding and nearly vomiting in his helmet, hands and pistol at his knees before twirling around and checking to see if no one was behind him.

No one was, friendly or otherwise. Scattered up and down that hallway, mundane, yet eerie, the blinking green lights along the corridor lighting it up brightly, if not unkindly.

He let out a breath again as his nerves got the better of him: the regret of being alive still. It was an exhale that sounded of a curse: "God dammit."

No time to mourn when deep in enemy territory, and that little tasking to secure the hallways to the main hangar of that Covenant frigate was complete. They were all dead… then again, so would he. This was more or less a suicide mission if he didn't get out in time.

His M7S submachine gun was again in his hand, tossed asides by the now dead Elite as he quickly grabbed ammo from his dead compatriots. No use to them, despite how wrong it felt to pick from the dead. This was his fifth squad, unfortunately.

This time he would be able to grab all their dog tags however. He would give the dead that at least. They deserved at least that in this war, making time, albeit seconds, to take the metal slices into his dump pouch as he ran back to what he hoped was a Pelican to deliver him from this place.

* * *

She thought the shaking was her personal journey into the Afterlife, and, more specifically, Hell if the transition was any indication. Six wasn't that much bothered by it after she ended up on her back, spread eagle, letting it come as laughter passed by her throat.

That's what she convinced herself this was: that she would be fully coherent as she went to Hell and she would be herself there. Though even as she accepted her fate, the thrashing about stopped, leaving her eyes closed in the middle of hangar, on her back, left to the familiar silence of a ship in space.

It wasn't nothingness, and, as she opened her eyes and saw the same purple steel that adorned all Covenant ships, the afterlife was either a cruel joke or this, indeed, was her coffin.

A roomy coffin at least, though that wasn't the case either, not when she got her senses back together and thought coherently again, back from the line between life and death again. The dead Covenant were still there, methane still leaking from the Grunts and their tanks, Elites still bleeding purple and blues, some even alive (if barely). The slipspace drive had gone off, looking at it still going, still very much operating as it does if it was in the middle of-

Six looked out the window, standing up, breathing returning to normal as her rifle returned to idle in her hands.

She didn't blip out of existence. Neither her nor the frigate, nor, perhaps as she looked up at what the hangar doors provided her for sight, a good chunk of the Super Carrier. They and all that was caught in the slipspace bubble, _were in slipspace_.

For Reach, it meant that the Super Carrier was still destroyed, severed, the objective of Operation Upper Cut fulfilled. For her however, it left her in a boat with no paddle, going down a river unknown. She confirmed that as she ran back to the slipspace drive. She knew enough about this sort of tech to decipher whatever the displays showed her. There was no heed designed to the destination, no Nav computer hooked up to it. They just were in Slipspace for as long as the Drive was capable of sustaining it. According to the readings: several hours.

That's all that this had become now: a slipspace trip to the unknown. Perhaps with no destination the drive would blink them all out of existence. Perhaps it would drop them exactly where they left off: over Reach. But, regardless, it meant, for now, she was alive, and that was a pleasant surprise to the Spartan.

But for the person that was the Spartan… Underneath that armor, the body suit, the years of training and augmentation, was a person who wanted to become who she was now. Underneath that body suit ran a thin gold chain and an old religious symbol: a wheel.

"One of these days it'll happen. I promise Ma'."

Perhaps she spoke with great timing as the chime of one of the doors of the Covenant ship opened on the other side of the hangar, the Spartan getting to the Pelican and going prone, using it as cover and a firing position.

No chitter chatter of Grunts, no sniffing by the Jackals, grunting by Hunters and Brutes or the language of the Elites. Maybe active camouflage as the door opened and revealed a-

Oh.

Black armor, a helmet almost like hers, a grey stripe down the center of the entire affair to denote his squad. His SMG was raised, scanning the hangar as he emerged from the second level entrance, using the cover left behind from the dead Covenant as a point to cover. He kicked a dead Elite out of the way for room, it flopping off the platform with a crunch, he hoping the sound would draw out any he couldn't see through his scope and VISR.

What he got was the almost pleasant sound of a whistle. From her time with Spartan IIs, she learned a language that not even her generation of Spartans had come across. Even a whistle, as generic as it was, was enough to denote humanity. Covenant species that were seen on the field had no lips after all, asides from the Brutes, but they were dumb enough to never catch on.

The whistling caught the attention of the ODST, the man snapping his sight, red dot from his laser designator tracking to the Pelican. He whistled back in the same ascending and descending tone.

Six took a knee, going to the back landing gear of the Pelican, revealing herself and using her left hand to signal to the ODST to bring it in. A raised thumb was given in response as the ODST made way fast, making it over bodies of dead, human and otherwise.

There was more than half a foot difference between the two as they finally met, but looking up to people was what this particular ODST always did in a way, so he was used to it.

"Are you…" Six spoke hushedly, as if there was anyone else.

Unfortunately, there wasn't, the ODST slowly shaking his head, the jingle in his dump pouch that of chains and dog tags.

"I'm sorry." She spoke empathetically. A data link was made denoting a tactical connection, the HUD in her helmet pinged as his name came up, both in the corner next to her motion tracker and over his head with an arrow: PFC J.D. Vital signs: green.

"JD, right?" His last name was long enough that it couldn't be given an easy on the tongue moniker. As was the quirks of the heads up display software.

Barely a word grunt came out of him with a nod, a finger pointed to the slipspace drive, only to drop as he looked out and saw what Six did. "It went off. This Pelican is dead in the water, and the Sabres are no factor. I had to set it off manually… I thought I'd… we'd die."

They were both people of action. Actions, not words, and it showed as they both stood there before what they assumed was a ticking time bomb, now a loose horse taking them… somewhere.

Still, at least Six could talk business, and right now the fact that this ODST, JD, was here, it meant that either rides to hell were communal or, more likely, they weren't dead. "You good Marine?"

The ODST looked her up and down, his own HUD establishing a data link with her and putting the three letter word that designated her team placement on that Spartan team: SIX.

Perhaps, in the back of his head, he thought it rude that she had detonated, or rather, activated this device without even giving him a chance to get off. Then again, his odds of surviving such an incursion hadn't been high in the first place.

There was supposed bad blood between ODSTs and Spartans, but they weren't sitting on that now, not when they were at war. They weren't even that type of people to partake in that kind of grievances anyway in their branches anyway. It was the first time either had talked to one another however. An ODST to a Spartan and vice versa, and this was it. It wasn't in the middle of combat, sharing tactical information or following/giving orders… it was here, in a Covenant ship, confused about what was happening to them.

The ODST nodded, preferring silence. It was an odd thing. In her experience Marines never shut up when around Spartans, speaking of one thing of admiration or a jeer or another. Six knew better sometimes. Sometimes silence was a sentence. Beta Company of the Spartan IIIs was survived by her, and two other Spartans, one of them robbed of her voice by psychological damage. He tipped his chin at her, depolarizing his VISR with a fizz.

Perhaps he had suffered the same in this long war she rationalized, holding his gaze behind her own helmet, unrevealing of her face.

Blue eyes. A face the spoke to a skeptic. A face out of film noir framed by a space age helmet meant for extraterrestrial combat.

She didn't depolarize her helmet, the ODST straightened his mouth into a line, honestly not expecting much.

"Yeah," she responded to his original chin tip. "I'm fine."

He gestured to the pack on his back: He was team Medic… was, lack of a team making that so.

He kept looking to the drive and to the slipspace outside, the caught debris of the Covenant Super Carrier hovering around them, reminding him that this ship whole was still in flight, still operating, still fully operational. Even the Savannah was still in for the ride, despite how it was nothing more than a wreck. They'd become a mobile graveyard somehow, Banshees, Sabres and Seraphs floating amongst a number of other tidbits of debris from the battle.

"We still got hostiles?" The ODST finally croaked out, his voice younger, but not old. Masculine, but not deep. An old American accent, just like her. His voice spoke with a quietness that perhaps led Six to believe it was underused, a rare trait in an occupation where yelling was the default tone of speech, but it was understood. Six shook her head, the ODST polarizing his VISR again.

"Probably. This ship still has lower sections. Did the ODST teams seal them off?" With enough welding, for the time being, yes. He nodded. They both looked at the humming drive, whirring its electric magic around them. It was a hard locked system, and even Covenant slipspace drives operated on the same principle, any surviving crew that came across this would've known to touch it would've been even more suicidal.

The Pelican came loaded for bear, weapons and supplies still within its cargo space, still waiting to be used. They would find their use. There was a shotgun magnetically attached to the back of her armor, it beckoned into her hands as she did the motions to retrieve it, replacing it with the Designated Marksman Rifle. With a judicious pump she had loaded it, thumbing in shells from her belt kit to top it off. She always preferred it when the opportunity presented itself. For close encounters.

"The drive will run for a few hours. Up until it runs out of charge. I think we should deal with sealing off the rest of the ship from the bridge."

There was no vocal complaint, not as the ODST carefully took the dog tags from his belt pouch, leaving them in the Pelican as he dropped the mag in his SMG, only to replace it promptly. He did the same with his pistol, press checking the round before holstering, one of the weapon cases opened up. BR55, a Battle Rifle. Probably from the Navy's stock, not available to the Noble Team, if only because they fell under the UNSC Army.

He'd use this weapon before, it was a good rifle, bursts of three and accuracy he could control with precision. Saved his life a campaign ago, in the jungles of Persei. That was back when he was just a grunt, before a Helljumper. Normally you started out as an ODST from day one in the Corps, however there were exceptions to be made. He was an exception.

"You green?" His answer to her question was the racking of the bolt.

The magazines went into his kit as the rifle was attached to his pack, ready and waiting, more than likely to be used. Killing Covenant wasn't easy, but there's a repetition to it, and often it included more ammo than he was able to carry.

Doing that was better than just waiting after all, and he wasn't about to play cards with a Spartan who didn't even show her face. No cryo to go into, and he wasn't about to waste meds, putting himself to sleep.

A Grunt corpse had been nearby, it still twitching its death throes, providing one last item that he often found handy. He popped the U shaped item with familiarity, popping the heat sink to check its charge and health. Plasma Pistols were as common in this galaxy as oxygen and stupidity.

With a stern nod, the ODST was ready, returning the question to her as she cradled her own weapon ready.

"JD?" She asked as a question. Was it okay to use that to call for him?

He nodded again, pointing toward a hangar door toward the front of the ship, one Six had just gone down minutes before. He tilted his head before holding a fist up to her, SMG cradled in his right. He shook it three times in a fist before opening it up with a show of index and middle finger, going flat afterwards, and then back to a fist.

Six understood after a moment, holding her own fist up as the two synchronized a pump, and then three.

She drew an index and her middle finger, and JD kept his fist.

Rock-Paper-Scissors for who took point, a ritual amongst Special Forces.

Six's luck was holding up today she thought to herself. With a breathy sigh and a subtle shake of the head, the two stacked up against the door of the hangar, and went in, JD on point, ODST and Spartan.

The halls were still bloody, still fresh and sizzling from the firefight that Six took on to go through the ship toward the Bridge originally. So they walked like predators, trained killers, a hunch in their back and their sight translated through optics and gun.

"How about… Six? Is Six okay?" He let it out, finally, stepping over the bodies of the dead slowly, trying to lower his sound imprint.

She was never given the option to say otherwise, she realized, but she was stuck with this man for a time now, and so he deserved an answer to that at least. "Sure." Was all she said. It was enough for now.

* * *

The bridge was as much as a remainder of a firefight as the last time Six was there a whopping ten or so minutes prior. It was time long enough for the reinforcements that the shipmaster desperately called for to finally arrive somehow. And just like their shipmaster, they fell victim to the same general reason as to why the bridge had fallen in the first place: they came from behind.

The ever-increasing pitch of a Plasma bolt being generated alerted the three Elites at the helm, trying to figure out their current status. Said bolt was let loose without warning. The Elites stood at separate stations, and the card of the left most, red armored Elite was drawn as it was caught in a half turn, dual plasma rifles almost brought to snap at the source of the sound. The green energy blast had hit the Elite dead center of the back with a burning that went through to its flesh through its armor. That wasn't what was important however, not when its shields shattered and brought its head to give a clear sight picture to the DMR aiming right at it.

The large marksman round had a loud, punching report in the close quarters, echoing harshly, but it was not as harsh as the steel punching through helmet and skull, the Elite locking up and then falling like a sack to the floor to join their shipmaster. The pure chaos it brought wasn't even the worst that had happened in that space today as JD dashed to one of the bridge's struts to take cover behind, Six pushing forward with the assurance of her armor and meeting the blue bolts of the plasma rifles half way. The gold flashes of her shield taking some glancing blows of the shots glittered, a feeling she was used to as she felt the numbed impacts in her ceramic-covered bones. She more than returned the favor as she saw the green bolt of Plasma, another charged shot from JD, fly out again to the Elites.

The Elites were more tactical than that however, four plasma rifles between them and kicking up an energized storm toward the two humans.

"Wort wort wort!" Was the decipherable part of their chatter from the Elites, having split off to their own struts for cover as Six charged, emptying her DMR to meet the opposite side of one of the struts an Elite took cover on, shooting across to deny the other Elite an angle to light her up.

JD saw the predicament, dropping the Plasma Pistol as Six made her play, her DMR clicking empty, mag dropped and replaced with another in a flash. The Elite who shared the strut with her on the otherside heard the click, both did, but the one who was able to get shots on Six was met with the purple metal shrapnel of SMG rounds hitting near its face, putting it back behind cover. Again, he had stacked up on Six, hand on her back as they went back to back, facing either direction to cover the Elites they had pinned down.

"Grab the shottie!"

A grenade was in Six's hand for barely a second before she threw it behind the strut, the Elite crying in surprise before rushing out to avoid the blast. The ODST had reached back and tore the shotgun off without thinking, the blast of the grenade shocking through the room as an Elite, dazed, shields pulsing in damage, had remerged on his side.

He pushed toward it from cover, reaching out those last few feet with an 8 gauge shotgun blast that painted the large windows of the bridge both purple and black, gelatinous pieces joined as JD threw the shotgun back at Six's back, the gun sticking as she pressed on the remaining Elite. He was going to join her as bullets started flying, however the Elite threw plasma bolts back, pushing back as shield hits were exchanged, a stray shot landing at the floor before JD as he basically jumped to put his hip on one of the birdge's console, angling shots with his SMG to pepper the Elite as Six finally broke both its shields and hers. The DMR clicked empty again as she reached her hand back and got the shotgun, shoving it into the gut of her target.

One of the doors to the bridge popped up smoothly as JD shouldered his Battle Rifle, twisting around and not seeing the shotgun blast followed by the sound of wet slamming against alien metal. The death cries that followed held no secret as to how Six was handling the situation with the remaining Elite.

A typical squad of Covenant infantry piled through, Grunts, Jackals, an Elite leading them only to witness an ODST and a Spartan make work of three of the premier warriors that were sent here to find out what was happening in the Bridge.

Seven infantry, so more than manageable as Six took behind a deployable cover left behind from the prior assault on this bridge, turning back around to where they had just been half a minute ago with a snap of his aim and a snap of his trigger finger. The rhythmic three gunshots from each pull of the Battle Rifle's trigger had been a well-rehearsed dance to JD, especially when two Grunts bit the dust with a bullet through their skulls before the doors behind them closed, the Jackals lighting up Six and the cover, the shield wall turning red as he backed off a returned to the other strut, taking the places of the Elites they'd just flushed out.

Six had primed another frag grenade, throwing it into the crowd as they dispersed from it, the echoing boom and crack that came from it throwing a Jackal with its energy shield somewhere else in the room in multiple pieces. Anyone who had tried to break left had met the peppering of the ODST with his battle rifle, catching Grunts and the lone Elite either taken out or bogged down as bullets bounced off shields.

Another crack, another pump of the shotgun and the sound of a methane tank exploding with the head of a Grunt followed as Six met the group point blank. She was just far enough away as she honed in on the lone Elite, JD expertly taking out anything else around her as a shotgun blast flew out. It only broke the Elite's shields as it tried to bring its two Plasma Rifles to bear, firing wildly in her direction, but in a blur one of them had cracked apart in electricity and plasma charge, thrown to the ground by Six's hand as she came back around with the shotgun butt ready. The amount of speed behind each physical strike was breath taking, the sound of the very air around them being moved as she swept her elbow across the head of the Elite almost as painful as the shrill sound of a metal blade sliding out of her chest holster.

In the move the Elite had thrown its claws at her head, but she had backpedaled as JD peppered the Elite's side, bare of shields, SMG rounds going into flesh as its left arm went limp as it was torn up. The Elite cried out from its very throat in pain, nothing else to be done as Six had the knife in her right hand to only slit it across the throat of the Elite. An ODST boot had met the squelch of its torn up side, sending it to the floor as he went past the body to secure the hallway, making sure no one else came through.

The Elite was still kicking, literally, its two cannon sized legs seizing up, catching Six's midsection and stopping her from diving on the Elite. There was nothing the Elite could do as instead Six squeezed herself in the gap between the two legs, shearing them off their very joints as she dislocated them like a wishbone, only to dive through into the very chest of the Elite.

A few more Grunts had come stumbling through the hallway, only to meet JD's gunfire, the man taking cover by the frame of the door and sending rounds downrange only to result in ribbons of flesh and more dark blood painting the ship.

The Elite had given out after an appropriate amount of twisting by Six's blade, going slack jawed as JD emptied his gun and took cover back behind the door safely. Six's magnum went out as she sheared the knife out of the Elite's body, sending a few pistol shots down range into the chunky bodies of Grunts and Jackals that came to meet them.

They were silent in combat, JD waiting for the metallic click of her pistol to ring out before she dived out of the way behind him, opening up back down the hall as a Plasma Grenade was primed and thrown down. The controls for the door were on that side, so after a quick punch it was sealed as the whine of a grenade going off came with the screams of aliens.

The concussive pumps that hit the door of multiple grenades going off in a chain reaction was a sweet relief.

Six had squeezed JD's shoulder, dashing off toward the bridge consoles, hoping her rudimentary knowledge of Covenant systems would be enough to seal what she needed.

The holographic displays and consoles were visual enough for Six to lead all doors that hadn't given them a pathway to the bridge and the hangar sealed as if there was a hull breach. The extra hydraulic sealing was enough to have given JD comfort to back off, walking backwards, until he felt Six's hand on his back again in a pat.

No condescending comment, no congratulations of being able to fight with a Spartan and keep up. Just business as usual. They both could appreciate that as JD held his gun at idle and faced the Spartan again.

She had beckoned with fingers to him, drawing him over to the console. All gibberish to him, but he figured Six had it well in hand.

"I think I was able to trick the doors to the lower sections into thinking there was an atmospheric breach here, sealing the doors."

That was good.

"It might eject our sections out into space when we're out of slipspace though. It can't do it while."

That wasn't.

The ODST looked his gear up and down. The battle dress he had been issued for this mission had been EVA capable. Bulkier than standard gear, but this was technically the baseline uniform for ODSTs. It wasn't exactly light or the most maneuverable, but it was as intended. Kept him alive, based on the plasma singing along his shoulders.

With a few more ambiguous finagling with the console, the display that was set across the main viewing window of the bridge came out, a camera view of where the Sabres had landed. Jackals had gotten up there it seemed, picking apart the machinery in their own EVA suits.

"You spec'd for engineering work?" It was odd, she noticed, with this ODST. Usually she was the silent one. To talk so much went against her nature. He shook his head, opening up his hand to her in a questioning gesture. "In a UNSC dry dock, yeah. Not here."

Off to the side a view of the hangar, and the Pelican with the drive, was on. Still there. Still safe. Still running. Transportation was nice to have.

He shook his pack again, making sure it was still there. It was all medical stuff, denoted by the faded white cross on it. Covenant made no care to the white cross and what it meant back in the day, so all it served to do for him was give him a bigger target on his back. "What's the deal with the Pelican?" he finally spoke.

"Thruster Gimbals are out. If we brute force enough power it might throw us back to manual control in the cockpit, but we can't as long as the Drive is still hooked up to it."

He nodded behind his helmet thoughtfully, understanding. It was mechanical at least, not something too endowed in the computer programming and all that. He wanted to be a simple worker in the Corps at first, IT and all that. Turned out he was crap at the logic and instead thrown, during his first deployment, into a Pelican with an MA5 and told to act as cannon fodder in some hopeless mission. Turns out his talents lied in the more physical aspects of the Corps. Brute force was how he made it this far, and he could, perhaps, understand enough to make the Pelican work out. With help that is.

"Need help?"

Six was almost taken off guard by the question.

Help was something she wasn't offered, wasn't expected to have. Most of the time she declined if it was an option. Sure, she'd been attached to units, different Spartan teams, along with assets to help her complete whatever objective her commanding officers had led her toward, but in the end, she was good with nothing but herself, and she tended to operate the best that way. She was, in a word, a loner. There was a saying: "Go Alone if you want to go Fast. Go Together if you want to go Far."

In this war, far was a fantasy. In the back of the heads of those fighting this war, who had survived longer than perhaps 80% of the UNSC group forces, they knew far was just holding off the inevitable of a lost war and a completed genocide. She did more damage when alone, and that was what mattered.

So, slowly, she had nodded her helmet. "Sure."

So it was JD that tapped her shoulder this time, going back to the doors to the hangars and leading the way.

* * *

Slipspace technology was a cornerstone of both the UNSC and the Covenant: the ability to traverse space being what had made the two powers what they were: space faring. They colonized, they transported, they traded, and they lived and die by their access and utilization of slip space to carry themselves amongst the stars. To the average UNSC defense system, the signs of a slipspace rupture about to open up was, in the case of Covenant attack, alarming, but well detectable for at least a good few seconds before the bubble opened up and whatever god forsaken fleet on the other end came through. Otherwise it was a very perceptible way to gauge slipspace traffic and civilian activity.

Whatever context would've decided what a slipspace reading would've garnered among those observing however was for those who _**knew**_ what slipspace was; depended on who was grounded by the rules of science that allowed for such mode of transport.

And that was why, given the oddity of the readings to the uninitiated, and due to the fault that the Slipspace Drive that the UNSC had rigged to take out the Covenant Super Carrier over Reach was very much a rush job, there had been a massive displacement of the spacetime fabric that had promptly created an odd effect on the planes of reality itself. Without a destination solution, nothing could've been sure, the drive broadcasting its effects across universes without regard, barreling through existences without regard and leaving traces, hooks, in random spaces. It wasn't anything that would've been picked up by the sensors of a standard cruiser of the _**Systems Alliance**_ and be deemed dangerous. Especially in a universe where FTL travel was instead defined by mass manipulation and fields generated by ancient devices afloat in space.

This, assuming, a ship from that universe would ever encounter the latent effects of a slipspace entry that was, possibly, would only ever be seen in another.

The plan itself, Operation Uppercut, was a one-in-a-million shot. Though that's the funny thing about it. A shot was taken, and it had to land somewhere.

"Daniels! Donnelly!" Came the hurried voice of Captain Shaw of the SSV Perugia, the bridge of the cruiser in chaos as the ship drifted in the shadow of the planet Altis. He yelled out to his most reliable engineers currently attending to the engine room. "Get me a sitrep! We need our engines going or else we're going to be in atmosphere in the next five minutes!"

The planet Altis was one of the rare worlds deemed highly attractive for humans to take over, skirting the edge of the Attican Traverse. Its waters were as blue as those on Earth, and, although perhaps not as gifted with as much land as the human homeworld, there was enough to support a very healthy colony which would hopefully become a major stronghold for the Alliance, and therefore, humanity. That being said a cruiser entering the system with no propulsion would be a lethal disaster, regardless of how pristine the mostly Mediterranean world was.

A Scottish voice broke through the comms as the Captain in his chair held onto the grips for dear life. "I'm checking all of the input flow from the reactor to the engines, but we've got nothing! I'm gonna keep searching!"

A woman's voice broke through next as the crew member at the helm of the Perugia tried to at least stabilize the ship in worst scenario of a re-entry, any view outside of the ship was digitally sent through all the monitors and control consoles, and the blue stared at them rather menacingly closer. "The eezo capacitors are still going! It should be still feeding to the ship but it's like all the eezo is frozen in place! Our mass is 1:1 right now! I'm trying a manual injection from our cores! Stand by!"

_"Mayday, mayday! This is the SSV Perugia to all Alliance elements on this net! We have lost Mass Effect fields and propulsion and are going down over Altis! Transmitting all coordinates!"_

The comm's chief was losing his mind, but the Perugia was a special crew. They'd seen combat before with spacers and pirates, Batarians in particular, so damned it all, the Captain personally thought, if this was how they were going to go out.

The cruisers were always giant coffins, he figured, but they'd never thought it this literal as the ship continued to tumble, ever closer, to the planet.

* * *

There was more oil and grease on JD's armor than Covenant blood, and he couldn't quite tell if he was okay with that. Regardless, Six had gotten the worse bargain, but it was only because she had the strength. She had basically gotten right on top of the right back thruster of the Pelican as Six manually held the stick in the cockpit down for a maneuver involving that thruster.

Six, with gracious use of her weight after a jump, slammed down on the Pelican's thruster, causing it to crack, but to finally break free from its stagnation caused by a Plasma bolt hitting it in just the right place.

The maneuver had put her on her ass, tumbling off and to the hangar floor, but with a few extra grunts up in the cockpit, JD had control of both thruster gimbals again. It was stiff, and he wasn't a pilot, but he took the ODST training and knew enough to pilot… that is if he needed to.

She groaned with a muted sound that came out of her mouth as she sat up, looking through the bay of the Pelican and past the Drive to look for her ODST. He had given a thumbs up, and she returned it as he got out.

One or two straggling groups had made it to the hangar somehow, but that had been within the first hour, the sound of distant banging of the other occupiers of the ship still signifying that they had been alive, but blocked off from Six and JD. Those two groups had been easy enough to deal with, and after that had been around three hours of breaking out the Pelican guidebook tucked underneath the seat and trying to find a way to get the thruster gimbals to resume movement without drawing power away from the Drive.

In that time then, they hadn't shared too much of a word that hadn't been quoting sections from said guidebook. Up until then. "We might make it yet." She said, meeting JD halfway, the man sitting on the lip of the bay as his gaze at the drive drew Six's.

She knew what he was wondering, going to the rigged up indicators. A lump in her throat sunk to her stomach in some uneasy anticipation.

"Seven minutes." She spoke, taking in a breath as she did a field check of her armor. She was lucky, one of the rare Spartan IIIs to be issued and augmented for field operations with MJOLNIR. She probably could've made it from orbit to Reach with an entry pack if she took Jorge's wish and flew with it. Nothing was wrong with it as far as she could feel with her gauntlets and gloved hands. "I'll pilot." She referred to the cockpit as she started gathering gear in the back, feeling around for the release of the drive.

Out of the corner of her eye she had seen JD shake his head however.

Their helmets locked gazes, and somehow he knew that she rose her eyebrow behind her black tinted visor. An odd choice of color he realized then. He had seen ONI spooks on missions with MJLONIR spec helmets, and those colors often meant specific functions. Even then, from publicity vids of Spartans, he had never seen a black visor. When helmets had been the face of the Spartans, her face was one that was… scary perhaps, like that of a hunter: eyes peering from the black.

"You guys do everything, don't you?" JD said behind his own helmet, a little sarcasm, a little relief.

"I aim to please." She said in some snark, self-pride, but knowingness. There was an image to the Spartans, and although she exhumed it, she wasn't who the human race thought of as a whole when it came to the Spartans. But that was a battle she would have with herself, and not toward the man before her, asking questions, impressed by her. Still, it took her a minute of going through her motions, loading guns and ammo and supplies into the back to realize that it was a compliment as he continued to sit there, looking at the drive. "Thank you."

The ODST nodded at her kindly, waving, as if to say there was no need.

His entire body ended up waving as the ship lurched suddenly, taking to the Pelican's landing gear. The magnetic pump of Six's boots activating resounded as she turned her head to outside at the bleak darkness of slipspace. She'd never seen it blink like a rainbow before, blink like a prism as the drive beside her started winding to a higher pitch.

She'd recognize this sort of shaking before, the minutiae that only she was able to pick up after so many drugs had been pumped into her and her very genes were modified. It was the feeling of leaving slipspace. Usually it was a feeling that took no more than a second to carry out, when the ships dropped out of slip space, but this felt wrong, as if the process was being elongated like a violin string being played too long. They were in for a ride, and seatbelts weren't going to do squat.

JD had been holding onto the landing gear for stability, but he had lost his hold as Six took him in one hand, only to throw him into the back, with the same stroke dropping the drive to the floor from the Pelican's clamps to the floor with a thud.

If everything was fine and okay, Six would've jammed the thrusters as soon as she saw stars appear. She would've thrown the thrusters into full overdrive and bolt out into real space.

They would've made it out of that suicide mission unscathed, to fight another day, if the Covenant frigate that they had so graciously borrowed for the attack didn't split in half at the very second they appeared back in real space, and threw the Pelican around the hangar like every single other item that hadn't been bolted down in it.

* * *

It was the fact that Altis was on the border of the Attican Traverse that spurred the response of several other cruisers to the mayday calls of the SSV Perugia: It had been the frontlines of the conflict with the Batarians, a ruthless species who had perhaps given mankind a further black eye in their expansions into the galaxy. The slavers who came for the humans of Mindoir subjected them to atrocities that very much fueled a part of the Alliance which called for wariness toward any species who hadn't come from Earth: xenophobes given a reason to stand firm amongst the stars and kill the filth that dare perform transgression against mankind.

Two other Alliance cruisers and a few civilian freighters nearby had come to the assistance of the Perugia about twenty seconds too late, but just soon enough to watch a brilliant pair of engineers onboard perform a miracle by performing a hard reset of the Eezo drives and the engines and see the Perugia stabilize just as it was skirting atmosphere.

Captain Shaw had been clutching at the very fabric of his uniform as he sat back down in his chair, the rest of the bridge crew somewhere between relief, ecstasy, and coming down from the highest of highs.

Still, the forty-year-old, olive skinned man had been through his fair share of highs and knew soon enough what to do when his ship was about to become Altis's largest boat. "Someone give me a sitrep of what the hell just happened!"

_"This is SSV Constantine to Perugia. How copy."_

_"Perugia to Constantine, systems are normalized and assuming ascent pattern. Advise all cruisers to scan immediate area for any Mass Effect field related anomalies."_

_"Vladivostok here. Scanning along all tri-band frequencies. Advise you to cover the rest. All freighters with area scans rated for Alpha Red-tier observations and up, we'd appreciate the help."_

_"Roger Vladivostok. This is Casablanca-3, we saw the ship drop. We're relaying its path it came into the planet with and out. I reckon we oughta steer clear."_

The chatter between ships was normalizing as breaths were taken back in, only to be replaced by the tension that came. Was it a Batarian trap? Some sort of test of a weapon that disabled ships for easy pickings? The scanning personnel had reported back automatically. No signs of any ships in the area that hadn't been Alliance.

Shaw's cap had still been reeking of sweat, but regardless, he kept it on as he scanned the bridge, able to pick out the sectors around the ship from the consoles around him and his crew. One console in particular got his attention as he sprung from his seat.

"There!" He pointed with his finger. The woman that was at the console had thought the same, too focused to report anything at first. He talked aloud, the comms picking up his voice regardless. "This is the Perugia to all friendlies, concentrate on these coordinates."

If Alliance ships of that design had windows, they might've seen the cosmic sparkle, almost like static, form like a ball expanding and expanding until it reach the size of a small moon. Its radius was big enough to reach out and touch some of the responding ships, but no damage came, nothing happened. Not until that ball receded upon itself and, in a flash that blinded every eye, sensor, and train of thought for a moment, spit up an impossibility.

It was as if an entire battle had been transported into the upper orbit of Atlis, a ball of war. Perhaps battle wasn't the best descriptor as much as it had been the results of a battle: debris of grey, mechanical, clunky nature floating amongst parts of hues and purples that shone so distinctly differently that there was no question as to the fact there were two sides of it. There were the remains of one blocky space faring construct: an almost y shaped block, cast in grey and black with a world and a bird of prey on it. Along with it, and more monstrously, what seemed to be an entire mountain of just pure, purple machinery: a honeycomb chunk of something that was very much not whole, eclipsing every single ship that was there with a dark shadow, ominous, signs of where it had been cut off from whatever it belonged to still red hot. Distinctly in the shadow of that giant chunk of debris, cast in a pale pinkish white shade, was another ship: the one that seemed the most put together. It looked like a sea creature, the way light shone off of it like that of a lizard, its skin-like armor awash with almost alien color. A leviathan almost, unknowable, ungodly.

The shape of it was almost like that of the Asari and their more curved design language, but it was distinctly different, and whether the fact that its bulb like body had split in half horizontally along its skeletal like structure was intentional wasn't quite perceptible.

It was a lot to take in, and it hadn't helped that it had come upon them, almost right ontop of them all. Maybe the computers would've had a better chance at fully analyzing it all, but all those details were ignored as, more promptly, all hell broke loose across the bridges of all present.

_"What the Hell?! Where did that debris field come from!?"_

_"LADAR scans say we've got energy readings coming from within it!"_

_"This is the Constantine! All ships get clear from it!"_

The most pressing piece of debris had been the monstrous chunk of… something that had measured nearly thirteen kilometers long, clipped, and three kilometers tall. A monument to something beyond their reasoning, and beyond their scope of knowledge. It was maddening.

"By God!" One of the crew members of the Perugia yelled out as Captain Shaw held his mouth agape. "It's bigger than Arcturus Station!" The seat of Alliance power had been dwarfed just by casual observation alone.

The largest ship in all of the Council Races had been the dreadnought currently tasked with protection of the seat of Galactic Power. Destiny Ascension, for all its power, all its might and mass, had been eclipsed by a chunk of debris.

They wouldn't know it precisely, but it was the remains of ship, that much they could guess. Its entire midsection had been taken and promptly brought along for the ride, and, despite not being identified by any Alliance sensors, what the sensors did pick up had been vital, if not horrifying:

"Scans are reading it as a _space station_?!" Even the crewman didn't believe it, but the algorithms came up as that. "Designate the largest piece of debris as _**Alpha**_! Taccom is designating the rest of the notable debris shortly!" The Perugia had been quickly ascending from Altis from its fall, however now it had to contend with an ever-expanding debris field, the smaller chunks of it like dust in the cosmic wind, caught by the planet's gravity and ever so slowly being sunk down in the same way the Perugia was.

"Someone contact the Altis Planetary Government! Tell them to hunker down because they've got stuff coming down right on top of them! Get Admiral Hackett on the line!" Shaw had taken back command as he rounded his bridge, checking each and every screen he could to take it all in as complete radio chaos erupted.

_"What?! Lifesigns?!"_

_"Does anyone have positive confirmation on any of the markings or makeup of any debris?! Batarian? Krogan? Vorcha?! Turian?! Anything?!"_

For each half answer came five more questions, and in the span of the minute and a half since the Perugia had regained power, they were thrown into the thick of it as the debris field was marked up and designated for pieces of interest in a situation that was becoming more and more dynamic.

_"Everyone get clear! Smaller pieces are coming down!"_

"Wait, wait. We've got lifesigns on Alpha?!" Shaw yelled across the bridge to his scanners.

"Affirmative! We've got bio readings on Alpha and Delta!"

"Delta?!"

Delta had been the intact, kilometer long purple ship in the shadow of it all and to every gradually volume stabilizing voice in the room confirming as such, it was still active. Hell, _**a lot**_ of it was still active. Just looking at how Alpha pulsed with energy, the honeycomb like structures within it still very much lights on. And if people looked closer, they would've seen the thousands that got taken on the ride: saved by the placement of energy shields that prevented complete venting, peering through and seeing that they hadn't been over Reach.

Perhaps, in different circumstances, those who survived aboard Alpha would've immediately went back to duty stations after reappearing in real space, and open up on what weapon stations were left on whoever was around them. A battle would've broken out, a First Contact battle like no other seen throughout that galaxy, between humans and a misplaced floating city full of genocidal, religious aliens with an unlikely pair thrown in the middle of it. Given the disparity between them, technology wise, it would've been something to see, even with a ship that had been missing its head and ass.

Gravity seemed to have its plan however as the entire mass of Alpha fell victim to the gravity of Altis.

What followed next was a landfall unseen in the history of that Galaxy ever since a previous cycle of galactic destruction, yet to be known by those who had existed at the time. A million million pieces of debris come down on the waters, burning up in atmosphere if their mass wasn't enough to survive re-entry.

The reports from the weather station on Altis, the colony only having one main city, had spoken to this:

A risk of rain.

The System Alliance cruisers led by the SSV Perugia had the situation well in hand. The early days of the space travel for humanity and the cluttering up of space lanes had led to some such landfalls in the past, so there was a routine to this: tracking the larger pieces down and clearing any zones of impact for any civilians and bystanders. This was anything but routine however.

"Communication from Arcturus Station Captain." Perugia's Comm Chief spoke aloud to alert Shaw. The man nodded in response. "It's Admiral Hackett."

"Put him through." Captain Shaw promptly ordered. He was still busy looking over the systems console and the sensor chief, tracking each and every piece of debris that was of note.

Admiral Steven Hackett was a man who officers never argued having guidance by, so Captain Shaw didn't think of what kind of goat rodeo he had gotten himself into now with who many in the Alliance considered the head of their Navy calling in directly. A legend of a grassroots naval officer, and Shaw was glad that someone with a higher pay grade was on this case as well.

"Captain Shaw, Hackett here. Sit rep?" That mature, gravelly voice came through.

Shaw took a moment to take it all in himself again into a quick enough response, eyes glazing over with the sensor data and the predicted land fall paths. "We've got multiple unknowns who've just appeared in system over Altis. All of them are being read as disabled but their mass and size means that they're going to get sucked into atmosphere before we can get an analysis on them. We're tracking them down and deploying QRF Marines to any prominent sites to try and contain any survivors."

"Are you saying we've got people still alive in these things?"

"We're sending you the telemetry now, but we do have bio signs in some of the wreckage. Judging on the size and descent angle of the largest piece of debris designate as Alpha, we will presume survivors."

"We have a read on how many then?"

Yes. They did. The numbers didn't make sense however.

"Negative sir, too much interference." Was the answer Shaw gave.

Being in the heat of what was, in some way, a combat situation, a first contact perhaps, there was something overriding their awe of what they were seeing. The debris had been beautiful, curved lines and craftsmanship that the Asari might've approved of. Most of all however it had been Alpha and its leviathan like size that dwarfed the colony, the ships, menacing the crewmen of the Alliance ships responding into combat alert.

"FTL test of some species we haven't seen yet?" One of the bridge crew of the Perugia opened aloud to the floor.

"Let's keep speculation down lieutenant." Shaw responded, turning back to speak to the air and thus Hackett. "What's our play here Admiral?"

There was a few, strained moments of silence, electronic noises from the various computers and consoles tracking the disaster happening before them unceasing. Finally the Admiral spoke. "Secure the planet, Captain, I'm leading a detachment of the Fifth Fleet toward you now. Until then, keep a hand on it."

"Affirmative Admiral."

"Hackett out."

Outside the viewports one might've seen the first splashdowns of the many pieces of debris that began to pour on the blue oceans and islands of Altis below. Some disappeared with barely a notice, others coming down, and hitting the surface hard. In the chaos of all this, pieces of Alpha shed off as gravity dragged it down, screaming and tearing. If one had noticed, they might've seen a hangar door of Alpha sheer off and throw itself into the frigate sized Delta's engine block, sending it downward, spinning, its passengers of two humans and whoever else remained going first.

* * *

She wondered if Jorge had the right idea, just jumping out of the hangar and back toward Reach. She wasn't trained to do as such, but her armor was designed for re-entry. It would've probably been a smoother ride, having reappeared above that oceanic world for a fraction of a second before everything went to shit. It meant that they did re-emerge in real space and, given her situation, she might've lived to fight another day.

That was before the ship started shaking apart, and her Pelican thrown out of the hangar on its way down to said planet. She didn't lie to herself, not when almost none of the control surfaces were responding and the ODST in the cargo bay had desperately closed up the hatch as he simply held onto dear life, making his way up to the cockpit as all he saw was blue.

He had had drops smoother than this!

Six had been grunting as she tried to take control of the stick, but to not avail as all she got was rudimentary left or right that was barely making a dent in the fact that they were currently going through atmosphere in the wake of the Covenant corvette. She was a pilot, among the most natural among the Spartans, but she could not fight when she had nothing to work with.

"JD!"

"What?!" His voice wasn't used to yelling but he did. The two seat configuration of the Pelican had left him behind and a little up behind her. The seating configuration gave JD a good look at Six almost sheering off the control stick with her bare hands. It was a delicate balance between that and not breaking it given her strength.

"Hop down here and wedge this with your foot!"

"Drag me down there!"

In free fall and in a spin if he hadn't had his ass in the seat he would've been at threat at being thrown against the glass of the cockpit. Six's grip strength had said otherwise, dragging him down as he braced himself against the back of her seat and the stick between her legs, wedging hard up and to the right to try and at least match the direction of the spinning to stabilize.

Six had squirmed her way out of the cockpit and into the bay holding onto the left wall of it as she herself was threatened to be thrown.

That was her intention however as she lined up her body, her mass, weight and all to just where she needed it. All nine hundred pounds of her. With the right type of push it violently nudged the Pelican in the right direction as JD felt the cue in the steel around him. He had assumed her seat as the Pelican quit spinning, starting to enter atmosphere, the howling of reentry around them. Six had reappeared as fast as she left, albeit leaving a dent in the interior.

"You know how to fly?!"

"A bit!" JD pitched the Pelican's nose up, slowing the descent gradually as the monitors and warning indicators around them blared.

Six's hands flipped to the switches to address them all about the cockpit. "We don't have enough power in our thrusters to get a good ascent pattern."

They were crashing then as they found themselves deep in a cloud layer, the clouds around them evaporating given the heat of re-entry. One spared look up and the Ardent Prayer was hot on their heels coming down. White surrounded them but not for long as droplets of water violently streaked up their panes.

"We need to clear that thing's impact." Six spoke aloud, more than obvious to JD as he had looked over the fuel reserves. The logic of what he was about to do was the same with the booster assisted drop pods for those especially obtuse landings.

"Grab your stick, find us a landing spot. I'm burning the fuel we got to punt us outta range."

She had affirmed with a loud grunt, finding the co-pilot stick and grasping it. "I have it."

JD let go, the Pelican shifting for just another jerk before Six resumed their fall. JD's idea was more or less just exploding the fuel in the tanks and venting the force out through their thrusters. Dangerous, yes, but it was a play for life and he had no other good ideas. Six had trusted him though, as he trusted himself. This wasn't the first time he had fallen from orbit.

"Once we break cloud cover tell me if you've got a target! Else I'm just gonna punch this thing!"

The clouds were cleared before he had even finished speaking, terminal velocity carrying them through to meet with that watery surface too fast. The same could be said for Six however. Einstein said, in layman's terms, that time was relative to the observer. Six had lived several lifetimes by the way of her augmentations as a Spartan. The way her genealogy had changed, the neurons of her brain, the cells of her system, it all gave her a gift. When the bullets fly, the explosions rock worlds, and the survival of the human race was at hand, the pain was what resonated through them all like recoil from a gun: quick, fleeting, teeth cracking and bone breaking. Six held onto that split-moment feeling, that iota of infinity, and lived lives every moment in time. "Spartan Time", a Spartan II coined. One of her mentors told her that. Lieutenant Commander Ambrose would be proud.

In the corner of her eye: A blip of land, a horse shoe shaped piece of beach that would have to make a landing area. She had jerked the Pelican's bearing that way and JD got the message, seeing the same.

With little other options or time to make consider anything else, they went in.

* * *

"Sir we just had an object make a controlled descent originating from Delta. Design seems to match the language used in object Charlie." One of the officers on the Perugia's bridge noted.

"To my console." Shaw ordered, the screen connected to his captain's chair rerunning the telemetry of that object falling like debris before making a clearly controlled flight away from the downward fall of object Delta. The scans were through too. Instead of the clean liens of the largest objects there and the monstrosity, this was more... angular, brown, to say the least. This wasn't a simple accident, and that object, to Shaw's trained eyes, looked of a war bird. The cockpit at least seemed accommodated to pilots that were human sized, as did the bay door. "Are we sure we have no identification from any of the archives? A guess about what these things are?"

There wasn't a differing answer on the bridge: No.

But what that mean meant another chapter in history. If it was not known, it was new. If it was not recognized by the Council, they were-

The protocol was clear.

"Begin preparations for First Contact procedures. We'll wait on Hackett to make that call."

"Aye sir."

There were more pressing things anyway given a human colony had been down there and within the range of effect for any touch down. They were lucky the Altis colony had been in mid-day with its 23 hour cycles. "I want all Marines on deck and deployed ASAP. We need to link up with the Altis colony and then start coordinating our response to this thing from the ground. There's going to be survivors. I want to coordinate this effort before it gets out of hand."

"Aye Captain." The officer went to ping the Marines stationed on the ship.

_"All Marines, get to your ready stations and prepare for deployment ASAP. You'll be briefed on the way down to Altis."_

_"This is TACOMM to all Marine Actuals, this is a large-scale SAR and Disaster Relief Op. Given anomalous and unknown contacts advise to be loaded for bear."_

The bridge crew had done their job and Shaw was proud of that, but still it wasn't enough. Not as the hundred thousand pieces of debris all started to slowly, slowly drag down and begin the show. "What other Alliance ships are in the system?"

A voice shouted out from another station. "SSV Constantine, SSV Vladivostok, and the SSV Seoul are all on station. We have two civilian freighters in the area as well. Sir the captains of the other ships have deferred actions to you."

Shaw would've sworn, but he didn't disparage. No. That came later, curling his fist along the arm of his chair. "We can't let those two freighters leave for operational security. Have the Seoul intercept and lock down and when they're done deploy any ground assets they have to assist deployments from Vladivostok and Constantine. We need all hands-on deck."

"Aye Captain."

A bridge in full swing was a beautiful thing of organization and routine. It spoke to professionalism even against the unknown. "I also need a read on any other Alliance assets in the area. Even with whatever Hackett brings this might get out of hand. Hail any in this sector and have them redirect."

One of the comm chiefs had turned to his neighbor on the console over. "We have any idea on any assets in this area?"

The other officer had taken only a second to think before nodding, getting the right frequency. "This is the SSV Perugia to the SSV Tesla. I repeat, this is SSV Perugia, hailing for Captain Hynes and Commander _**Ryder**_."

* * *

In ODST training, recruits had been drilled to perform drops that would've broken weaker men with nothing but their two feet. In the field all you had, in the end, was your body, and so if an ODST was told to drop, they'd drop with but themselves. That's why when he woke up his body shot up in the crooked cargo space of the Pelican, a huge gash opened up in its side as he felt the pain course through his body with a groan. The very fact that there was pain was good however, especially when he ran his hands up and down his own body and didn't feel anything too out of place.

Before he could check on the pilot however she had pretty much fallen out of the askew seat of the Pelican and into the boot with him. A glance at the cockpit had shown they were in some sort of sandy plain, the sound of peaceful ocean around them making it known they had hit their target, whatever that meant.

The tell-tale sound of the biofoam in Six's armor being spread throughout her pains was heard by the ODST as she rose to her feet, collapsing onto the wall as her labored panting echoed throughout that dark hold.

Further away: the sound of debris exploding and scattered pieces of ships making planet fall surrounded them, hitting water, the world swallowing them if they couldn't float.

His training kicked in, the part of training that had him liable to check Six's armor for any intrusions or lacerations.

"I'm fine!" She swatted him away. He was only a little offended, but nothing that stopped him from finding his SMG and feeling around in the dark for the cargo door of the Pelican. He had found it, pressed it, but the mechanical whirring and the slightly creaking of the cargo door was unsatisfactory. It left Six to take a running start, her right foot leading, planting itself on the door and it being sheared open by her kick. She tumbled out with the momentum, onto her stomach, but she had risen again with an angry groan, only for her to ball a fist and hit her side like an ape. The pain meant she was alive.

So it was true: the strength of the Spartans, bending metal like paper and giving JD his way out as he peered out with through his sights.

A beach was not a bad place to crash, all things considered. The sand beneath his boots was soft and inviting as he took his first steps out, Six following close after, guns raised and scanning their surroundings, her free hand dragging weapon cases out as the bright light that took them all was adjusted to. Bright blue and white sand, behind them: that small jungle that inhabited this horse shaped island.

It was the roaring sound above them that broke them out of their short visitation of paradise.

Today just wouldn't let up.

* * *

From the edge of space, the view of the numerous pieces of debris hitting the ground had been like stones in a pond. Of course down planetside each time a piece of debris that hadn't burnt up in atmosphere hit tidal waves had been made. Tsunami grade. Any island in its way would've been awash with the salty waters of Altis as if it had been a storm, despite the crystal blue skies. If there was anyone alive on those ships going down, a water landing had been preferred to hard ground, however if it had been ground at least their impacts would've been more self-contained.

"We tracked that unidentified object down here. About the size of one of our Makos, a little bigger. It made a controlled landing and we tracked two life signs disembark. _**They're humans.**_" The sensor crewman that had been tracking that particular object had Captain Shaw right over his shoulder, basically breathing down his neck, but it was understandable.

"Keep an eye on them. We don't need them disappearing while we track the rest of this."

"Might be hard sir. In the next sixty seconds that frigate sized object is going to come down in two pieces, close enough to make a splash."

Shaw turned around to the comm chief. "Is Altis Colonial HQ updated on the situation?!"

"Aye sir! They're hunkering in place."

"Tell them to open up their landing pads for both evacuation and to act as a staging point. We need Marines on the ground to start ground operations immediately! What's our status on reinforcements?"

"SSV Tesla is dropping in less than ten minutes and the Seoul has started prepping their shuttles. What're the orders?"

Shaw had returned to his chair and opened up all frequencies. "This is Captain Shaw of the SSV Perugia to all Marine Fireteams currently deploying. You'll be getting communique from your COs regarding information but generally the plan is this: establish a perimeter around the crash sites. If there are survivors, and there might very will be, if they are not identified the protocol is clear: _**First Contact**_. Do not engage unless fired upon. Captain Shaw out."

First contact. Those words were wet with history and responsibility, but the crew was given no time to think of it as they felt the very metal around them creak.

If gravity was given a sound, it was the sound like a stomach, bowels rumbling and groaning. It permeated throughout the metal of the Perugia as soon as Shaw had finished his orders. The entire bridge crew had tried to find a place to handhold as again, the ship shifted and groan.

"Alpha is going down. I repeat, the planet has her. Her mass is messing up our drives!"

"Make adjustments!"

The ship rattled again violently, but his engineers and con officers were able to take hold of it again as the ship righted. Shaw's cap had been far and away off in some corner of the Bridge as it had been thrown off of him, his white knuckled grip on his chair not letting up as those that had been thrown onto the floor had gotten up and back to their stations.

Why was a ship this large ever made? How was it made? Were there more? Questions that went past Shaw's head as the visual feed on Alpha remained and showed its slow descent down into the planet. Perhaps he feared the answers he would be given as he felt the Perugia lurch upwards to regain altitude. The old saying rung true in diplomacy now as it did centuries ago. It was a saying respected by mankind's first extraterrestrial enemies, and one that gave mankind a bite despite its only recent emergence on the galaxy wide political field. Though it was a saying that came back to haunt them now:

Speak softly and carry a big stick.

The stick that was hurtling toward Alpha was beyond any measure that was comprehensible by the metrics of shipbuilding as Shaw knew it, and any philosophy that came with it. It was in the back of his mind that he feared, just as the Alliance had come to hover over this, whoever owned this ship might come looking for it with an example of this wreck that hadn't been burning.

"We have hundreds of contacts jettisoning from the ship! Kodiak size and smaller!"

Shaw had made a sound come out of his throat that was of surprise and fear. Forget worrying about who owned this ship. Worry about the ship itself.

"Escape pods?!" The visual view of Alpha had seen it gradually, almost hopping, up in defiance of its inevitable pull down. The underside of Alpha, concentrated on unidentifiable circles made in its hull, glowed blue each time it happened, allowing more waves upon waves of escape pods and objects to jettison.

* * *

Usze 'Tahamee had before in his long-storied carrer as a Special Ops Commando under the command of Rtas Vadumee been offered a spot among the Covenant Honor Guard. They were the Elites tasked with protecting the Prophets themselves at the Holy City. An honor and a privilege, clearly, but it had its caveats. Usze very much knew that it would've kept him off the frontline, fighting the heretical humans, and he'd would've been engrossed instead with a ceremonial position. So he declined, and not once did he ever regret that decision. Even today as he had made his way down the remaining hallways of A Long Night of Solace, explosions and decompressions happening elsewhere on that massive ship reverberating through the hull.

He had a destination however, unlike the Unngoy or the Kig-Yar who scampered about panicking. At least the Jiralhanae kept them in line by murdering those who were overly panicking. It'd been a half an hour or so since communication was lost with the stern and bow of the Super Carrier. Information relayed by the Huragok and their translators were sparse, but the Bridge had been lost in the UNSC attack: cut off by the slip space bubble. The Shipmaster was gone along the entire command staff.

Usze had burst into the secondary bridge, left for only emergencies or training on the CSO-Class. To say that this had only been an emergency seemed to be underselling it however. He had brought an entire procession of his comrades, and they were given no extra answers about the situation.

The lighting of the ship had been dismal, flickering at sporadic intervals, the three-tiered bridge also sparking and damaged, but still usable.

Only a meager four Sangheili had been trying desperately to manage the affair.

"Is this what's left of the command staff?!" Usze ground out, unbelieving.

One of them had taken the upper tiered command platform, frantically trying to assess and contain the damage. He had barely anytime to address Usze. In the lighting the Spec Ops soldier could see now that the Elite had been way over his head, he was only ranked as Minor judging by his armor, mostly likely the secondary shift crew for the bridge.

"No other bridge staff had come yet and it's been nearly an hour! We're all that's left until we get a headcount from all sections!"

Usze hadn't been an Officer in the Spec Ops division for long. He had remained where he had been for three tours because he craved the combat, the action, to test and hone his skills. Rank was rank however, and the hierarchy was the reason why a dozen of fellow Spec Ops members followed him.

"Do we have any indications of any of the command staff surviving? The Prophet?"

"Our onboard sensors our going haywire and our processors are hung up trying to calculate our positions. We're not able to ascertain where we are!"

A Hurogok had floated up from the recessed sections of the bridge, speaking to a Sangheili in its tones and chirps, with the flick of one of its tentacles. "Use the troop transporter's gravity lift to keep us in orbit! Our gravity generators are barely holding up as is!" The Sangheili translator responded.

The impromptu captain had almost hacked in disbelief. "That'll burn out our reactor with the force that we need to-"

The entire ship had shifted down, the entirety of those present up off their feet and halfway to the ceiling before what remained of the ship's repulsors turned back on. Distantly an Unggoy screamed for its mother. "Make it so!" The Elite revised, on the floor and quickly getting back up.

Usze had picked himself up from the ground as he waved out to his comrades that had followed him. "Go! Man the stations!" They had no training, but an educated guess was better than no hands at all. Usze had ran to the captain's platform, looking over the diagnostics that had been on the holographic screens.

It was as bad as the rumors had been: 90% of Engineering and Power-related sections had been cut off at the rear. The entire front of the ship had been lost as well, accounting for the Command Staff and spiritual sections as mandated by the Covenant hierarchy. What had been left was the chunk in the middle: the entirety of troop and crew accommodations.

The humans never had enough intel to guess the capacity of a CSO-Class carrier, but if they had they would've made these targets to be taken out by any number of suicidal methods. These ships carried the Covenant Empire where High Charity couldn't, and thus carried with it that weight. A weight that everyone, all those ill-prepared Sangheili, felt now.

A Long Night of Solace, or rather, what was left of it, also felt of it as the electric whine of the transporter energy grid going into overdrive to keep it afloat, also felt that weight of gravity.

"Did anyone else get caught with us? Ardent Prayer? Blue Heaven? Willful Tangent?"

"Unknown! Sensors are scrambled!"

"Then open up the visual feed!" Look out a window. That was the gist of what Usze said, and, surprisingly, it did them well as they saw multiple ships around them and not engaging. They were grey white with blue streaks, angular and boxy, and significantly smaller than most other human capital ships that would dare take on even a wreck this close. Unlike them however they were very much clearly active.

"Those ship designs. They remind me of our Lords designs. Could they be-?" One them had whispered aloud.

"What're you talking about?" It was a drastic thought, surely, one knocked away by the sound of a larger energy conduit going up in sparks somewhere else on the ship followed by the emergency warnings on the consoles. "Scan them!"

At least the ship to ship sensors were still active, and they were powerful enough to read back familiar data. "Humans!" The sensor operator called out. "They're human, but their ships are displaying anomalous readings."

"Like what? What trickery are the humans up to?"

"These ships, we can't get proper displacement or mass readings on them and their make-up."

Usze's eyes narrowed at them, they were blocky like most the uncultured humans, their designs always robust, if not primitive. These ships however, if they were human, they were… different. It was only then he realized something that everyone else had forgotten at that moment: they were the enemy. They were the enemy and not the drastic status of their ship.

"Do we engage?" One of the sergeants asked.

"Who's the ranking officer here?"

The warriors who came with Uzse had known who to look at: Usze himself. Many of them weren't his own, merely those among him who saw his dark crimson armor and recognized it as a mark of distinction. Though what that meant was that he was an Officer of the Special Operations. Far higher than anyone there, even the surviving bridge officers.

Usze felt the eyes bore into his armor, the back of his head, his very being. He more than anyone would've chosen to engage, but something was… off, regarding the designs of those ships flying.

None the humans had ever used, and he'd seen his fair share in this campaign alone. Nonetheless, he thumbed over the holographic console, showing weapons stations. Several of the crew had remained at their posts defiantly but diverting any power to weapons would be suicide. "We cannot."

"I concur with the Lieutenant Tahamee." Her name was Seylu Karonee, and her low voice drew the attention of the substitute bridge crew as they were to her. There was something of a half cape on her, as was customary for Sangheili matriarchs traditionally. What little culture the Covenant let the Sangheili have bleed into its military operations was often items overlooked or non-disruptive of the procedure of military conduct. Karonee was a Shipmaster, but not the Shipmaster of A Long Night of Solace. Her wings had been clipped.

"Shipmistress! We'd though you already transferred back to the Blood of Union."

Her CCS-class battlecruiser had been one of Solace's many support ships, and she had been the leader of that support group.

She nodded fiercely, half cape flowing her an arm movement. "Ardent Prayer was to ferry me back. Clearly things have changed."

She was smaller than a typical Sangheili warrior, as was true for most of the females of their species, her skin shades lighter, however she was an example of one of the few Sangheili shipmistresses that existed in the Covenant. Her bloodline was endowed with Sangheili history. Once, long ago, before the Covenant, her family had a son who had been named Arbiter: a title of great importance to the Sangheili in forging their history. Now was not so in the Ages of Reclamation, but regardless, there was great military history to her blood as well.

Usze felt the weight of that blood even, and the Tahamee family was respected highly for a merchant family.

"You seemed to have taken command Lieutenant." Her fast stride had betrayed the gracefulness of her uniform, but this was no time to stand on formalities as she approached Usze on the command deck. He nodded.

"Protocol is clear. You have it, Shipmistress." He, with an ounce of formality, bowed out.

That was her intention in a fierce nod as she went to work. A Long Night of Solace was by far bigger than her CCS, but the analytics and data collection was the same, along with the general controls. Her hands glided and flew over the holographic controls, getting what she needed as, somehow, her presence alone stopped the echoing and scream of metal around them to stop momentarily, or at least, be suppressed.

"Who here is actual bridge crew?" She yelled down a tier on the bridge. A meek few raised their hands. "Good enough." She looked into Usze's orange eyes. "I remember you from updates regarding Commander Vadumee's force composition. You shared much of his distinction during your training. Your initiative surely brings you here today."

Now wasn't the time to retread his resume, but Usze could do little as the Fleet Master spoke to him. "I wished only to contact the command structure." he said promptly. "The BattleNet is down and communications are down throughout the ship. I needed to know where me and my Elites could work best."

She looked over the interim bridge hands. "A dozen Spec Ops personnel? I don't know what you expected to do given the magnitude of this situation, but I have to say I'm impressed." She didn't give him the time of day as she continued to fly through the control prompts, directing systems and personnel all by the wave of her frantic hands. Even then however her tone was cool, measured. "Thank you for bringing your Elites."

"Your orders then, Shipmistress?" Usze stood as straight as he could in the chaos.

"Hold on." A diagram of the ship came up on the projections. Only a third of the ship had been left, the front and aft blazed red by the diagram unsurprisingly. "The only propulsion we have is our maneuvering manipulators, and even then they were not meant to keep us stable. We also hardly have enough power to sustain the gravity lifts."

She looked down to one of the Huragok in the command channel sections of the bridge, its luminous tentacles reaching deep and in to try and rectify some situation. The Huragok wouldn't tell them, all they did was make it work, and no Sangheili there had any real technical know how of the Covenant systems operated. That was by design of the Covenant, the Sangheili warriors and commanders, but not grunts and technicians. Subservience by the Prophets was of course, holy, by the Writ of Union.

"We'd have to sacrifice life support in the Unggoy sections first however." Usze suggested without lapse.

"Unacceptable." She answered swiftly. "That only buys us minutes."

Usze tilted his head at her aggressively. "Then what would you have us do? Let our remaining fusion cores run themselves out and then plunge?"

"In a manner of speaking yes. It's an inevitability." The Spec Ops Elite was flabbergasted as a visual on the remaining time on the reactors was displayed. No time at all. "Flying is, of course, a form of falling Lieutenant. We shall fall graceful as possible then! Transfer power to auxiliaries."

"You're giving up?" Usze thought her mad. "If we hit the planet we'll dig the ship right into the crust!"

She shook her head at Usze's ignorance. "We cannot dictate our circumstances, only our reactions." She said simply, going through her unsaid plans as control panel by control panel she flipped through. More systems than her cruiser, but then again, A Long Night of Solace was over twenty times the size of her CCS-Class Battlecruiser.

Usze was young. Among the youngest of the Special Operations in all of the Covenant. His brashness resonated as he rose his tone, stepping and leaning in toward the Shipmistress with the intent to disrupt. On a normal day Usze would've been struck across the face, stripped of rank and standing because of it. These were extra ordinary times however, and even Karonee knew that.

"We have several _**million souls onboard**_." He pleaded, he reminded. As was the troop capacity of a CSO-Class. It was not a ship meant to invade planets. It was meant to invade galactic empires. A million of each of the Covenant member races came aboard A Long Night of Solace to invade that human planet Reach. Families, entire blood lines, nations and clans. Their survival was more than tactical. It was necessary to the sanity of those onboard.

She paused, looked him in the eye. All he got was a scowl. "Shut down the reactors. Let us fall."

"What?!" Usze yelled aloud.

Karonee was not hesitant in her orders. "This ship has survived war and the darkness of space. It shall survive impact with the planet if we use the troop transporters to soften the descent."

"And what of us?!"

"Move everyone you can to the upper decks. If not that, then have them jettison by any means. Fighters, Phantoms, Spirits, even escape pods."

"This is madness, we have to recollect and coordinate damage control while we're still-"

"Lieutenant!" Karonee had reached out and grabbed the shoulders of Usze's harness, staying his thoughts and keeping his jaws closed. "_**You are the only remaining officer from the Spec Ops Corps left on this ship.**_ Everyone else was either in the cut off sections or deployed on the planet. You are responsible to save the lives of your unit and their associates as best you can. If you wish to coordinate a response, coordinate the evacuation. That's an order."

Usze's pupils expanded, breath lost, a world put on him. "I'm the only one left?"

"Yes. Now go. _**They're relying on you**_. I will not have someone questioning my decisions in this time."

* * *

To be given responsibility of your own was a way to distract form the responsibilities of other people. Was Usze Tahamee the last Spec Ops officer on board? Probably not, Shipmistress Karonee had rationally thought. Still he was the only one with the head to try and find a command structure and take hold of the situation, and if that was the case he might've well been the only one.

Dealing with an evacuation of the lower decks wasn't particularly in the purview of his training, his talents as a Spec Ops Commando, but he had his orders as he passed along the messages, making way down the labyrinth of the Solace. The whole of the CSO-class had been bigger than the moon over the planet of his birth, and when it was filled for the sake of war, it carried more people than Sangheili could breed over a generation, but he carried the words of the Shipmistress, and no one argued as the rush up was had.

The giant vehicle platforms for the armored divisions had been moving at a brisk pace, it having brought along not only the Wraiths and Ghosts by the hundreds, but also the crew complement who were evacuating. The sound in that cavernous room was eerie, chaotic. The only other time it had gotten to this activity level is if troops were being recalled before a glassing of a planet was had. Then again no CSO-Class ship in the Covenant had ever been destroyed in combat, and the procedure and response was less than practiced.

The Mgalekgolo hadn't been particularly happy at having their entire colony within the ship moving at once, but they didn't have a choice. That was how kindly Usze put it as the Hunter let out what counted as a grunt and took off with its bond brother. In that vehicle bay Usze had his hands full, and the Unggoy in all of their panicking hadn't helped. The Kig-Yar seemed just about ready to start salvaging their own ships and the Brutes about to tear them apart for it. At least the Scarabs had a way of moving the crowds along as the emergency sirens continued to emanate.

"This is the last one?" Usze asked the Sangheili Major in charge of the vehicle bay.

He nodded. "All Scarabs are accounted for and moved toward the upper levels. We're trying to save as much as we can but we're running out of space."

Usze nodded urgently, reassuring the Deck Chief. "Don't worry about the vehicles, the lives of our men take upmost importance."

"Even the Unggoy?" The Deck Chief snickered, allowing himself one moment of snark in a place that threatened to give away and let them be victim to space and gravity any moment now.

"As is the word of the Shipmisstress."

The Deck Chief had snorted. "You don't seem like you agree." He caught Usze's scorn in it.

The buzz of the Yanme'e swarm above evacuating had drowned out any response Usze could've given back, so all he did was nod and move off.

It had helped that the lower levels had played host to most of the hangar decks, final preparations being made to jettison off the entire fleet of shuttles and transports to temporarily hold onto gear and personnel as Solace fell. Most of the Banshee and Seraphs had been lost in the Slipspace rupture that took the command and engine sections with it, but some remained in the hangar decks here for repairs.

Deeper still the Solace went, and deeper still Usze would go.

In one door way a mess of debris had clogged up any way into it, but as the space emptied out Usze had heard the ringing, the howling, almost having just run past it and disregarded it. The compassion of Elites was not understated in terms of battle, but empathy as the humans understood it? A weakness in some regards, but Usze had weaknesses as any living being did. When he heard the screams, the cries for help, he abided. Lighting the energy daggers in his suit's gauntlets he started chopping through metal.

* * *

They were touching atmosphere now and the Solace was not happy with it as pieces along the bottom deck began dropping off according to the readings, taken by gravity and the extra strain of the energy couplings coursing through the hull and putting that stress on them. It'd been a scant thirty minutes since Usze had left, and it felt as if nothing at all.

The Solace had been dipping down for a while now, and the ships in the distance hadn't done much anything yet talk among themselves. It wasn't a human frequency and code they were using, the Shipmistress noticed. She alone had any real time on a bridge of a capital ship during engagements with the humans, and thus she knew their codes and the breaking techniques. What had amazed her in her ten year career on the bridge of a ship as its Shipmistress, and ten years before that as an officer, she did not need to do the usual code breaking protocols to pierce the UNSC net.

Even the simplest colonies of man had ships and procedure in response to them.

Something was wrong, and it was said in the stars as she looked past the visuals of the ships.

There was not enough processing power to be redirected to astrometrics, though she had theory…

A theory in her head that knocked off as Solace buckled again.

"We don't have much more power after this! I don't think we can keep the troop transporters or our repulsors!" A bridge crewman had cried out. Hopefully she had bought enough time for evacuations.

She had taken a kneel, holding her fists to the floor and steadying herself as she awaited the inevitable. The secondary bridge had been high enough to not get swallowed, however the shockwave would reverb throughout surely. "Let the transporters burn out. Brace for impact."

* * *

The hole in the floor was nothing he couldn't jump over, but the debris and clatter of bodies and steel had been more detrimental to his process. The hole however gave him pause to marvel at the below: he was still in space with beautiful blue below, clouds separating atmosphere from space. If he had been trader like his family's bloodline expected him to be, he might've held more regards to the arts and beauty. That wasn't how he turned out however.

Usze hadn't known what to think of abandoning his family's roots of being traders among the Sangheili, however he had known he had made a better soldier for the Covenant than peddling raw materials back and forth among the clans.

It was a fact a motley collection of survivors who had been trapped behind steel and debris had appreciated to find that Usze had been their savior as he had come across that ship section's brig. No humans yet this campaign, only the unrulier Kig-Yar, and they had been pacified with the fact that the entire ship had been falling apart.

"Where's the warden? Usze had pulled asides some fallen paneling, unable to be reached by those stuck in the brig. The door had been jammed and the source of it had been out of reach by those trapped on the other side. In one heave the door had been opened and the dark interior of the brig was revealed, its cells already opened up and all the Covenant species within roaring to get out.

One of the Elite Minors charged with guard detail had answered, shuffling past Grunts trying to claw their way out as the way opened and Usze threw debris asides. "He was off duty when this mess happened. Me and the guards were the only ones left," he said urgently, but thankful as that sliding door was finally thrown open.

The dozens trapped had fled past Usze to higher ground. "What're the orders?"

"To evacuate to the upper levels and brace for impact."

"We're going down?!" The Elite Minor had seemed unbelieving.

Usze nodded solemnly. "The only thing we can do is get ourselves prepared."

"It's true then? We've been trapped here for two hours now and we've lost contact with engineering and the bridge."

Decapitated and without their own ass, what the Elite had inquired was the polite way of saying such. The Kig-Yar had basically thrown themselves ahead of the Unggoy there as they clambered forward, making short work of the gap that Usze had passed over. The smaller squat creatures had no hope to make it.

Usze motioned for the Sangheili and Jiralhanae there to follow. "Orders are to preserve as many as we can." Even when he was speaking to save them the Unggoy had been skittish and fearful of any words that came out of Usze's mouth. His armor and position served him well for influence. The one that he picked up screamed loud before it was tossed across the gap. "Take one and assist."

Some of the Jiralhanae had laughed. The Unggoy being their play things had made this not the first time they been thrown by the Jiralhanae. They wouldn't complain either way, not when they had been saved from the obstacle of a hole, running to safety.

The next few minutes were that of Grunts being thrown, and, barring one or two missed shots, all of them had made it over, and those independently capable of making it over had started to do so.

"Is this the last accessible point in this section?" Usze asked of the Sangheili there. They had all nodded in affirmative, making the leap over the hole. The lieutenant had thought it prudent for one last run down before he had left, even with the words of the subordinates. If the Solace were to go down, this section would surely come to be drowned in water and rendered inaccessible. Several of the more confident Elites had stayed and waited for his return, but the several extra minutes that Usze had allotted to making sure no one was left behind would ensure that he was going to be one himself.

The ship groaned again as a great electronic breath was taken in by the Solace, felt in its corridors and vents, and then all at once: a heave like it was unwound. Everyone again on the ship had been thrown in some way upwards toward the ceilings, the g-forces of the final drop being taken from the Solace felt as metal screamed and those pieces of the ship already at hazard of simply falling off did so.

And with them had been anyone unlucky enough to be near them.

The hole in that hallway had widened and taken several of the Sangheili with it, and those that were lucky enough to find their footing again could only do this and scream at Usze further down that corridor:

_ **"We have to go now!"** _

Those that dared had ran off to find him as the rest made their now even more perilous jump.

* * *

Regardless if they were alien or not, hostile or peaceful, malevolent or otherwise, Shaw's ship had been close enough to the Solace on its way down to be able to garner a glimpse of how it fell. More tragically: how those who had fallen through gaps in the ship had fallen first through. To see hundreds of individuals fall planet side, burning on the way down through re-entry, it gave him pause in that chaos.

"Poor S-oh-Bs." His XO had given her comment quietly as the bridge burned the image of that giant wreck, the size of one of the Relays, fall into the planet.

It was violent and a disaster yet, but in the quiet of space, framed by their viewing screens and ports, it fell almost, almost-

"Softly." Shaw had said under his breath.

* * *

It took Usze double the time to get back as it had for him to leave, but that had been understandable seeing as the ship was shaking itself apart as it fell. Internally he had damned the Shipmistress for now just sacrificing the Grunts and their relevant sections to keep power to repulsors and their makeshift gravity lifting.

As he hit the wall, balance unsteady, he had seen the Sangheili that had been so foolishly concerned with him down the hallway.

"Lieutenant!" They cried. He had waved them back down.

"Run!"

Dodging pieces of exposed wiring and coolant they knew what it had been like when the world was falling apart now, doing nothing to help them as the door to the safety of the path to the upper decks was seen in down a hall that now seemed too long to make it as the alarm klaxons burned themselves out in their incessant screeching.

The legs of a typical Sangheili had been strong, but not all were equal as they came to that hole at break neck speed and, for a split second before they were forced to make the running jump over, saw a planet that had been too close and the remaining external shields hold on for dear life against the re-entry forces.

It was a distraction too much for some as they stumbled, choked, and came up short to the hole, their heads or chests banging against the ledge as gravity dragged them out screaming.

A split second challenge that Usze would be the last to try as he tightened his fist and put as much strength into his calves as he could. A handful of Sangheili that had made it over looked back as one foot left the floor.

Usze held his breath and flew.

He didn't fly, but he threw himself.

When the top of his body hit the gap his claws dug into steel. Below him: the planet, fast approaching.

"Lieutenant!"

The draw of gravity itself felt like Solace was gonna drag him down first to the planet if he let go, a death he wouldn't choose over battle. With one scream he had hauled himself up and over the ledge again.

"Just go! Run!" He waved out his arms as they all ran that same direction with such a sheer will to survive. The world was shaking apart and they were at its heel, however if they could just make it past the bulkhead they would be shielded from impact relatively safe enough.

He ran. He ran as fast as he could, but he couldn't run faster than the Solace could fall.

The big crunch that encompassed his reality was like the big crunch that would've ended the universe, it buckled his feet, buckled the walls, and a million things broke at once as Usze hit the floor, only to be thrown up to the ceiling. He didn't know if he screamed, if he yelled in pain, but he willed himself onto his feet as the pain in his head numbed his hearing. He looked forward to the door.

They had made it!

"Lieutenant Tahamee!"

It had been becoming more and more likely that he wouldn't as the survivors looked to him and pointed behind him as the doors automatically shut on them.

It came as storms do, wet and heavy, without warning. It came through the floors though, not the roof. And if not the roof, the hallway itself as every battle Usze had fought in blazed through his memory as a wall of water came at him like a Ghost boosting through human cover. He was face to face with it and the only reason he hadn't been smashed and drowned was because of the same systems that kept the exposed sections of Solace with a breathable atmosphere:

A blue shield had kept the water walled off for him to make it to the door. Distinctly he felt the tilt of the ship as its motions slid into place, presumably onto the planet, sparks coming from the circuitry peppering his skin, his body hitting the door.

"Damn!" He said aloud, fist into the door once.

He knew what had happened. The ship's automatic response to a hull breach was to cordon the section, and he had been trapped behind it.

Suddenly the banging had started from the other side. Those that made it banging on the door desperately. "Lieutenant!" they cried.

The force of water was different than the emptiness of space. He heard the hissing, the seizing, the coming short circuit of the shield that blocked the tide from him. He didn't even have enough time to make peace with himself properly.

"Go! I am lost!"

"No, we're going to try to find a way around just hold o-!" He drowned out their pleading as he stepped in front of the door. If they tried to retrieve him they would be met with death, for his sake, and no Sangheili would ever let that be the case. On his honor he knew what to do as he traced the creases of the door with his rifle.

He let the Plasma Rifle's caster weld the door shut, his back to it as he stared into the abyss past the shield. He heard the groan of nature come at him from beyond before the first waves of piled ceaselessly into that hallway, straining the shield more and more as its blue turned to pink, then to red.

For Usze, he closed his eyes as the flood of ocean water came gushing at him and awaited his Great Journey.

* * *

The Perugia was still organizing the first of the Marine teams to touch down as Alpha had hit the water at a velocity that was preferable by all parties, which is to say it didn't hit the water hard enough to erupt something in the planet's crust.

The Alliance had never observed an object of this mass hit the planet in any capacity, they also, certainly, had never seen it an object at all make the descent it could. Whoever was the captain, or whatever staff that was left in control of it, they would be commended for their efforts. The ocean around it had let evacuated on a massive scale, only to rush immediately back in as Alpha found the floor of that body of water. For as large as it was, it barely looked like it got its feet wet.

It didn't take long for all those flight capable contacts they had seen take off from it earlier reconvene on the top surface of it to deposit what they held within. Whoever these aliens were, they had training, had procedure, and as much of an emergency as this was they knew how to deal with it to a measure by themselves. Escape pods had been picked up by shuttles of their own, thousands and thousands deposited into the sea as wreckage and debris kept falling and falling, impacting the waves like hail.

For the meanwhile all Shaw could do was look on and see it all unfold before him. Waiting was the worst part, as they said. The Perugia's systems rang out again. The blips on their sensor IFF had pinged that a new battlegroup had emerged out of the nearby relay.

"IFF flags as the Fifth Fleet… we're receiving hails from Admiral Hackett." One bridge operator reported.

"Put him on."

Shaw and Hackett had come from the academy, same class. They knew each other on an acquaintance level, by name, and had definitely known each other during the First Contact War, but Shaw had always known that Hackett would be far and away the one who would helm the Alliance at some point and not him. It was better that way. He enjoyed captaining a ship where crew and captain were more intimate by the degree of having less of a rank difference.

It was with that Hackett was all business as vid comms were opened up to Shaw's console and saw Hackett in his own captain's chair.

"Captain Shaw, any updates?"

He bit his lip. "That large debris designate Alpha has just touched down. We're monitoring seismic and ocean activity in response. Holding off on putting our teams down there until it passes."

Hackett nodded. "And Altis?"

"Nothing that the colony hasn't already prepped for. Storm shelters and above ground evacuation points on their buildings are all set and ready to go. Colony had a fair amount of people but they should be good."

"That's good Captain. I'm assigning all troop and ground-based operations to you while I handle communications and organizations starbound."

"What's the prerogative then?"

"Minimize damage to the colony and secure any assets we have down there. After that once we make physical contact we play it by ear."

"Just keep the Council off my ass Admiral. I don't need no Turians coming in behind us."

"We'll try. Hackett out."

As the comm line was dropped another carrier had appeared just behind the Fifth Fleet as they all made their way to orbit around Altis.

"SSV Tesla is dropping in behind the Fifth Fleet." Shaw had been updated as to why the Tesla had been called. Gossip around the comm net had always been rife with high profile assets and where they were stationed. The carrier Tesla had carried one of the first N7 Operatives: a man who had been a pioneer and knew what First Contact was.

Shaw nodded fiercely. "Open up a line to Commander Ryder."

The Comm Chief nodded. "This is Perugia Actual hailing Commander Ryder via Captain Hynes."

"To my screen when it happens." Shaw had ordered. Moments later it had happened on his captain's console.

He was the physical manifestation of a raven, sleek black hair slicked back, eyes piercing, yet tired, his face covered by a greying, yet oddly trimmed beard. His face was sunken in as one does when facing nothing but the stars, and just a general murmur of his circumstances as of current from any who knew him gave anyone pause of empathy.

"You called for me Captain?"

"I have orders for you."

He raised an eyebrow. "I didn't think you had the clearance to dictate an N7 operative's orders."

"No, Commander, but I think this situation warrants your presence." Alec Ryder was a man many would be liable to mistake as having a stick up his ass. No. In truth it was the entire tree trunk. Shaw was right however as he stood his ground against the N7 on the view screen. "We need you down there, coordinating a forward response to this. Someone of your caliber can be trusted, correct?"

He nodded, but not without reservations. "Nothing a Marine Officer couldn't do Captain Shaw."

"If these were Turians, sure, but this is something out of our league."

Ryder had nodded roughly. "We were briefed by the Fifth Fleet coming in, but still, requesting an N7 might be out of touch for something as delicate as this."

The graduates of the Interplanetary Combatives Training program had been known as the N7s. Among its alums had been a who's who of human history in space and the First Contact War. Beaten by training, and cut into combat, the N7s were all heroes in some way shape or form, and the one that Shaw called upon one of the N7s that had first stepped through the Charon Relay what seemed like a lifetime ago.

He was a staunch man, slapped on the wrists for many a thing: most of all his questions into the artificial intelligences, but he hadn't been forced out of the Alliance yet, and Shaw knew him by name. Ryder's eyes wandered, corner of his mouth frowning. Every part of his being yearned for the thrill, the ability to be out there.

"Besides, I thought you were the N7 that was always big on being the first one out there, pioneering and all that."

There was another scowl, a twitch of his eye. Shaw was right. There was a reason he had already been in his armor.

The sensor chief in charge of tracking two humans that had made it planetside from the wrecks had appeared by Shaw, awaiting his attention.

Thankfully Ryder hadn't been too hard to get going. "Assign me some men and I'll have the First Response teams make First Contact by the book. If it comes down to fighting, I'll play hardball."

"You'll get what you need. Shaw out."

Only a second after Ryder's comms had gone out Shaw turned to the waiting staffer.

"We've been able get a reliable reading the two humans that came from this mess. We should be able to keep track of them until they're recovered."

"Right. Break the perimeter only when it relates to them. We need to go secure them before they get lost in this mess. Task Ryder and a fireteam to it."

"Aye captain."

A digital representation of the wave kicked up was displayed, slowly eeking its way toward the two humans.

* * *

Six's armor had weighed something of a ton on its own. She could only guess that she weighed like a small anchor, but it gave her little comfort as they saw the wall of water approach them as they hunkered in place, having seen A Long Night of Solace fall before them and hit water. They both took pleasure in seeing a Covenant ship fall surely, but none had ever seen one hit water, especially none this big. Hindsight was 20/20 however, and it wasn't surprising that a giant tsunami was coming at them from the displacement that the supercarrier offered.

She heard sputtering behind her, JD twitching and frantically looking around for some sort of cover. She had allowed herself for one second to question the man's mental capabilities, as if he hadn't been good with words, but she disparaged herself for even thinking like that. Death like this wasn't something anyone was expected to know how to face.

There had been a massive white rock deposited on the beach from some time in the past, obviously having not moved in centuries. It, perhaps, would not move for this: that wave less than a minute out.

"Hey! Follow my lead."

He nodded fiercely as he caught her gaze, running toward that same massive boulder, feeling for his battle belt's dispensation for metal rope ODSTs used to rappel. She had also the same equipment on her own battle belt, offering one end to JD.

"Hold." He did.

She ran around the boulder as fast as she could, the sound of roaring waves approaching as JD refused to look at it. When Six rounded once she took the rope end from JD and tired it secure around her waist, taking his own rope and doing the same to him. Bound by a rope, they were connected by hooks and knots as she motioned to her back. JD got the message, she facing toward the wave as she felt his arms wrap around her midsection and hold on tight.

If their suits had been spec'd for EVA work, their suits were able to take similar underwater environments just as well. That's the best they could do as both JD and Six closed their eyes and held their breaths as the wet roar shadowed over them all and then crashed.

He didn't feel the wetness, thankfully, but he felt the pull, the pressure, the unimaginable push and pull of the thundering of waves come over them. It knocked him off of his feet regardless of his own strength, Six becoming the pole as he became the flag in the aquatic wind.

Six herself, she weathered it well, her shields having no reason to break or her armor any reason to fail as she stood like a statue as the first wave came over them and the island, sinking them both underwater. Faintly in her ear she could hear JD grunting, his hands trying to claw into whatever handhold he could in her Mjolnir armor.

Today was never going to be an easy day however. Not when, out of the blue of the ocean barreling towards her in the wave and current, was an Elite struggling to keep its composure in the tsunami, unable to see that he was going to ram into Six and JD. For all the talk of Elites being related to squids given their mouths, the last thought that ran by both of their minds was that, in some way, they were going to swim with the fishes.

The impact was hard enough to break her shields, and as they were carried with the current as the boulder, for all its size and weight, tipped over and did away with the tautness of Six's knot. Tied up in their odd three-man swim, kicked off of her anchor that was a rock, she never missed an opportunity to gut a vulnerable Elite as they flew through water.

* * *

Getting washed up on a distant beach wasn't even the end of their plight that day, Six and JD clawing their way through wet sand, the blood-stained knife of Six's staining the white sand. She'd been busy underwater gutting any Covenant that drifted anywhere near her and JD, and it had been a fair bit. When the Ardent Prayer went down it spewed out all of its surviving crew into the water. As the currents came and went, depositing the two soldiers on the beach, it carried the crew of the Ardent Prayer as well, washed up by the dozen on that beach head as Six and JD had their bearings returned to them, their rifles and weapons magnetized to their pack and armor, still there, and in their hands as they took hold of their situation.

Like seaweed on any other ill managed beach, the debris on the one they were on was numerous, mostly organic, and coming to same as them as they stood on wet ground and saw how outnumbered they truly were as the sky continued to fall around them.

The coughing and hacking of the Elites and Brutes that hadn't drowned filled the air as they came back to life, sprawled out in the sand as they looked up and saw two humans standing over them all. A few dozen to two, and the warrior instinct of the Elites and Brutes came back to them before Six and JD could fully process what kind of shit show they'd just been thrown in.

Two grenades had been in Six's hands before JD could react, raising his M7 at the closest Elite, hacking up water and sand from its throat. Six had smacked the bore down however, lobbing two grenades into the biggest clump of targets. "Run!"

A Brute howled out at the two standing humans, only to get drowned out by the explosions of frag grenades picking Covenant apart, those two humans dashing for the tree line just barely before the plasma and spike rifle fire started again in a slow, but building pace.

The grenade explosions had sent bodies flying as plasma grenades caught in the blast also ignited in a chain reaction, exploding up and down the beach and painting the sands purple and dark reds.

Too many however. Too many to properly engage with what ammo they had. Too in over their head as the ghostly sound of a Covenant Phantom blew over their head, the mechanical sound of its turret tracking the tree line. Their eyes had looked up at it: revealing the background that a bright blue sky did nothing to hide.

This ship was intended to invade Reach. Now what remained of it would come down to this planet, only two soldiers left to face them down as far as they were concerned.

The very wave that brought them here and spread remains of the Pelican with them, including their weapon cases: one of them hung in the trees above Six. She had rattled the trunk hard as it collapsed onto the ground, a ranger green mass of metal and electronics come pouring out. It was in her hands and over her shoulders before Six ID'd what it was.

"Bound and cover after this! We'll keep pulling back until overrun!"

JD nodded, and that was enough for Six as she aimed through her VISR with the weapon on her shoulder, a thin red laser coming out of its bore right through the very cockpit section of the Phantom. The low delay, the sound of JD opening fire with his silenced SMG, what kicked off their supposed final fight was the roar of a red laser erupting from the weapon, right through the head of the Phantom.

Another Covenant ship had hit the waters that day in a crash, and it wouldn't be the last as the jungle around them danced with enemy fire directed at them.

"Go!" Six had yelled at him. He had dashed off directly straight, ignoring the Phantoms flying above them obviously going to try and flank. He found his cover in the form of a raised sandy mound.

He hadn't enjoyed using his voice in combat that much. He was either usually alone or had enough other ODSTs to never necessitate communication from him. All he did was listen to orders and carry them out. His voice was getting tired because of it, but he wouldn't stand on his personal preferences in a firefight. "Set!"

She had came to him faster than he thought possible, the speed of her run betraying his own eyes as she made the same run from the beach in a third of the time he had. The Spartan Laser had been dropped in the dash close enough, but it didn't come with her as she made it to cover with him.

She had jumped over and onto her back, throwing the empty magazine of her AR into the forest away from them and slamming in a new one, charging handle slapped mercilessly. Overhead they heard the sound of Phantoms and Spirits, but they had done much to disguise the sound of other shuttles: blue and white painted ones that had blazed over them all to overview the area.

They drew air into their lungs as their VISRs went alight, red silhouettes by the dozens past the tree line. More than they could take on and expect to survive. Despite this JD had reloaded his SMG, peering down the gun's short-range scope and steeling himself. Six heard his teeth grit behind his visor. He was an ODST alright, Six had considered for a moment. Quieter than most, but an ODST.

He didn't need to die here.

JD felt a gloved fist rock against his shoulder, taking a glance at Six.

"Keep going, try to find an exfil or a way to get some help." He opened his palm toward her, tilting his head sharply. "Don't worry about me, I'm expendable anyway."

He hadn't known why he did it but he had grabbed her forearm urgently, a blue tac pad welded onto a bracer beneath his finger tips as he touched. A dozen different messages: Don't go. It's not worth it. You're gonna get killed.

"I'll be fine."

What her move had been had surprised JD as she, about to pounce over, faded into a see-through glimmer: to the inattentive she was invisible. He had seen this once from the intelligence footage. Only the most spookish of ONI agents had access to this kind of technology, derived from the Covenant's active camouflage used to get the jump on grunts such as him. To see a Spartan use it was… disconcerting.

The impressions left in the dirt had revealed she had moved out of their cover, leaving the ODST alone as he held his breath and fought with himself, taking off against his better instincts into that seemingly endless jungle.

It didn't take more than one look back to decide he had made the wrong decision to run.

* * *

Admiral Hackett had been no stranger to situations that would throw history on its head. The only reason why he had known that was the case here was because he felt that same pit in his stomach as the first time his ship had arrived over Shanxi during the Turian invasion. Nothing could really prepare him for an unidentified alien species getting caught up in what was clearly a ship bound catastrophe, having to face planetfall on their own.

What only heightened the danger was the fact that hundreds of contacts that had emerged from Object Alpha had followed it down and started deploying on top of the ship. Any of them there could see that the aliens were running their own search and rescue op, but they were too distracted by the fact that, from orbit, visual scans had very much confirmed that these aliens had been something no one before had seen. Not only one type, but at least a handful. Furry bipedal beasts, predator like aliens with their jaws split in two like squids, short, squat servants seemingly with contraptions around their harnesses leading to their mouths… Too many to comprehend, too many to know. Never in the galaxy's history had this many new species been contacted at once.

"We've discovered a coalition perhaps, Admiral." The SSV Kilimanjaro had been one of the Alliance's handful of Dreadnoughts as allotted by the Citadel, and as that, it was Hackett's flagship, heading the Fifth Fleet. It brought along a substantial part of that fleet that had been just splitting off from a Turian fleet regarding defense exercises, and, it was needed. The Kilimanjaro, though a dreadnought and the largest ship in the Alliance fleet, was still out sized by Alpha by a measure of at least a hundred and fifty time by almost every metric.

The observation came from a deep voice. The flow of a Londoner, but an American accent. It was an eloquent voice from a sturdy man. Hackett turned around to the dark-skinned man. "Is that so Captain Anderson?"

They knew each other by name before the exercises, but they had established a more amicable relationship given plans in the future. Plans that were to be put in motion no more than two weeks in the future.

He nodded in his blue officer uniform, his face pitted from age and combat. They were both veterans of the last first contact war.

"Turians and the Volus, Salarians and the Krogan, the entire Council and the Citadel itself. It would not be wrong to assume that several species we haven't discovered yet have already formed their own pacts without our intervention. It's only natural. And here we are on what looks like to be the worst day of their lives."

Maybe such a union would explain the might of that debris and what it implied. Only via cooperation would anyone be able to make something so great.

Anderson stirred, thinking more why than what. "Do you think this is all of them? That they're like the Quarians? A space nomadic species without a home planet... Why else would they have something this massive?"

Hackett held a finger to his chin, looking over the tactical map displayed on one of the bigger screens of the Kilimanjaro's bridge. The Kodiaks from all the Marine divisions had been about to make landing and establish operating bases, the perimeter soon to be made. "I'm more concerned if this is a warship or not. And based on some of the battle scoring on the debris still in orbit, I suspect it is so."

Anderson tightened his jaw. "If I just survived my ship crashing, I wouldn't be too welcoming on a massive amount of unknown shuttles coming overhead."

"That means we'd have to signal intent."

The wish they had more time, that they could've come across these individuals in different circumstances, it floated between every human there. But there wasn't fear, not that many years after they had been introduced to the galactic community. There was caution, aversion, yes, but not fear just with meeting a new species. Where the fear came from was what same unknown that once perpetrated the Turians in the first battles with them.

There was a procedure, and the Council would have to be alerted. Any questions or real diplomatic attempt made by a specialized crew or figurehead that were trained to be envoys to the different xeno cultures would have to be put on the wayside as the Systems Alliance Navy was on deck.

"Let's make the call. Comm chief, transmit on all frequencies, and send off a standby to the Council."

"As if they would speak any language we know." Anderson had been more than wise to say.

Hackett had given the admiral version of a shrug as he nodded. "No but it's more for the record, for us, than them. Everything else comes later with diplomats on the ground."

The comm chief had made the necessary arangements, opening up the transmission to all frequencies that could be possibly used by any communication device. "Aye sir. On your go."

Every ship captain who had patrolled the Attican Traverse had been briefed with a package and a script that they would deliver to any new space faring species they would potentially come across in the natural course of events of a patrol that went off the beaten path. It was a good package too, analogous to the famous Golden Record that had set off into the universe at large out into the interstellar medium. This was not the time to transmit that however, and, as they would soon discover, it would not be needed. Not when the Covenant was already so familiar with a human species that the context of a first contact package was made obsolete, and actually a security concern. Not when First Contact was imbued in the midst of a tragedy.

So Hackett improvised.

"This is Admiral Steven Hackett of the Systems Alliance, representative body of the Human Race. On behalf of _**humanity**_, we will offer any assistance we can to you given the circumstances in the hopes of peaceful and productive diplomatic communications between our people. We are deploying shuttles to you now to assist in your relief efforts if allowed and will be waiting for your response. Be warned that any hostilities will be answered with an appropriate amount of force. We are capable of defending ourselves in the case of hostilities, however humanity hopes that it will not come to that. If you can understand and have received our message, broadcast on any open frequency. We will eagerly await your response. This message shall repeat."

* * *

There was a tilt to the secondary bridge of A Long Night of Solace, but at least it hadn't been on fire or, otherwise, vaporized with all of its occupants. Rudimentary power had still been on even to pick up and broadcast that human voice through the bridge. Some of the crew had a few bruises here or there, but they survived. That meant there was still a command structure to follow and a common structure to give orders out to.

"… Do? Do these humans not know who we are?" A lone voice from one of the Sangheili.

"I want all of transports ferrying men to deposit them on top of the ship and start damage control and-" Shipmistress Karonee heard the whisperings of the crew. The thought had always been on her mind, but who they were weren't as important as what they were doing as hundreds of shuttles were launched from their ships, the voice of a human male warning them of it. "It is a possibility."

"But how?! We've been at war with them for nearly thirty years! Surely you jest."

Karonee narrowed her eyes at the waveform of the message on one of her remaining screens, running it back as the message continued to transmit.

_"This is Admiral Steven Hackett of the _ _ **Systems Alliance** _ _, representative body of the _ _ **Human Race** _ _."_

She was not an old Elite. She had found herself in service a decade after the crusade had begun, and by that time she had heard of the human's diplomatic attempts to achieve a communication with their Covenant. It was heretical to even answer back, and eventually their "UNSC" had learned to not even bother. Now however, for it to be attempted again, with a name she'd never heard before "Systems Alliance", it gave her pause to consider a course of action. It came to her quickly.

"Form a perimeter, but do not press the attack. Something's wrong here and engaging with an enemy who has superiority in orbit will not get us out of here alive. Make it clear that we will not be condescended upon."

"The humans are deploying forces quick though, they might've already gotten the drop on survivors already blown out of our effective range!"

She tsked. "I'm not saying to not shoot back. We just have to choose our battles."

With one swipe of her hands A Long Night of Solace got her orders, and the war machine roared back to life.

* * *

The Marine fireteam of Jaeger 3-2 had flown over the small island which had been unusually alight with activity. The report of gunfire and explosions coming from it drawing notice from the Marines. With one flight over the onboard sensors of the Kodiak saw the reason why.

"Taccom this is Jaeger 3-2 we've got hostilities confirmed. We have eyes on two humanoids and a feck all bunch of aliens. They are engaged in active combat."

"Do you have an ID on the makeup of the hostiles?"

"Negative Taccom. They match no species in Citadel space, I repeat, they do not match any known species."

A silence had come across the bridges of the 5th Fleet. The flagship of the 5th, the one which Hackett himself personally came on, was quiet in preparation for the Admiral to make do with that information. That this simple day of escalation upon escalation surmounted in yet another day of history for the galaxy. He nodded over to the tactical command on the bridge, a stern look in his eye.

"Lock down the system. No one in or out until Admiralty says otherwise. We are in First Contact."

And humanity used to think that the stars were dead…

The Taccom chief nodded as the entire crew of the bridge shifted priorities and remembered their trainings, their own history: a First Contact War had happened once before, and here they were not to make the mistake again. The Turians had taught them better.

"Roger that Jaeger 3-2. This is Perugia Actual to all combat units this net, do not engage unless fired upon. This is a first contact situation. I repeat, first contact protocols are a-go, first contact ROE is in effect."

Hackett heard the radio chatter take up all the sound in the room: of a war room gone to war. He turned over to Anderson. "Suit up. You have command of Tesla's Marines, I want a GHQ set up in the colony ASAP. I've have a feeling we're going to need to have a place on planet to contain this all."

Anderson had been skeptical of Hackett's immediate military pull: to start landing on planet and setting up for a prolonged operation as if they had been the ones invading Shanxi, but his doubts had been washed away as the sound of panic and screams came from the comms.

Flying over the mass of Alpha, Alliance shuttles saw the top deck of it gleamed with an off white, purple hued metal, the spinal section of it a dark mess of superstructure that, when the pilots looked closer, saw the scattering of the aliens below and all of the equipment that they had dredged up. Too late did they realize that AA emplacements were being set up.

"What?! Incoming fire! Evasive maneuvers!"

In another lifetime, in another time and place, in another story and reality, the Systems Alliance might've known the wrath of the Covenant at full bore just as the UNSC did, and in that they might've tasted what genocide really was at a galactic level. The galactic genocide that would come for all of them however, was not that one. But there, on a barely colonized planet, a blue gem amongst the stars, the Systems Alliance got a taste of what that war might've been.

Plasma Fire scorched the skies as the shuttles all took evasive maneuvers finding their way down, some shots hitting home, sending the unlucky few hurtling downwards as enemy fire touched upon them all.

Fire erupted from the pockets of survivors who had been thrown from the wreckage and saw only unfamiliar shuttles come down upon them, fire erupted from the remaining weapon stations of Alpha, from handheld rifles and entrenched ship to ship cannons, Alpha had come down upon a lagoon, and so most of it remained above water.

The taste of the Human-Covenant War that came as Alliance Marines hit the deck and started deploying to forward operation bases to contain these new arrivals was a taste unlike anything they'd ever encountered. Overwhelming, unknown, a near dozen new alien species seen for the first time in that galaxy, and all of them coming to fight against them.

And with them all: a man and woman who knew how to fight them all.

* * *

On her stomach she had scurried back into the foliage toward the Covenant, her active camouflage shimmering until she settled herself at the base of a tree, eyes glued to her motion tracker, 25-meter radii around her. A dozen different contacts of Covenant, still wet and heavy and confused, but having a bearing: her death. Several meter spread between each of them. Grunts, Elites, Jackals, the occasional Brute interlaced. Spreading and searching with weapons in hands as they all used their primal senses to snap at the air and try to pick up any whiff of her.

A Grunt cried out as they came parallel to her, unseeing her from the corner of their eyes with her being actively camouflaged and still. The Grunt pointed out at the mound that she and JD took cover behind, rushing up proudly with a Plasma Pistol drawn, leading the pack to it and peering over, seeing their imprints.

They spoke in their alien language, knowing that they had just been missed, rallying on that mount and looking at the direction JD had gone. She was closer than they had anticipated though, especially as she slowly raised herself and decloaked, finding the spine of a Brute presented to her a few steps away. Her knife did the rest of the work as the Brute howled before being silenced, the Brute Shot grenade launcher it carried swiped away by Six as it fell. As the rest of the group turned it was too late. Shrapnel and high explosive fragmentation had been laid at their feet as they were burned away in fire and grenades, bodies flying as one Elite tried to charge her, only for her to bring the rear of the weapon to bear and swipe it across the neck of the Elite.

There wasn't much left after that as Spartan Time kicked in again for Six, hearing the discharge of a Plasma Pistol fly toward her. She dived back behind the cover, her Assault Rifle in her hands again as she heard sand and dirt turn to glass from the miss. More had been coming, and a Grunt was on point this time. Unluckily for it she had pointed out its orange armor from the foliage, opening up in a burst of fire before again pushing forward, the Grunt crying out as its methane tank was pierced, only to have its head drilled through by bullet.

She was a wolf in her environment, turning back on her active camouflage module attached to her armor and seeing the enemy falsely fire where she had been. It gave her enough time to set up for another shot as a pack of Jackals pushed, their shields pushing back foliage. It was a process that repeated itself over the next sparse few minutes, she getting shots in where she could, not staying her feet. The bodies had piled up, her blade wetted with red and purples, casings piling along the ground as she lost herself in combat. Lost herself in her instincts given to her by the Spartan Program. To kill Covenant was what she was made to do and that's what she did as she returned to coherence sometime later: an Elite trying to find better cover, having lost track of her in the combat.

Her HUD blinked red, ammo indicators showing that what she had was low. That was why her AR had been in her non-dominant had and she felt the momentum of a run toward the Elite. She saw no reason to deviate as she felt the warm shocks of plasma rounds bouncing off her.

She had ran into the Elite, her shields glittering, and like a monkey raised herself onto its back and neck only to let her knife dig deep and out. She was in her element, five feet apart from an enemy. It brews chaos and she lived in it, and she trusted JD find a way out or, at least, some help.

Until then she could keep herself busy, her boot over a Brute's back and, for good measure, breaking its spine. She'd done this so much it was second nature to her.

The pride in her work was something that she alone had among the Spartans. Where others saw it as a burden placed on them by circumstance, she saw it as something integral to her, and she stood there over the dead and appreciated her work. The ONI censors had in her file contemplated whether or not, if she was allowed back into a civilian life, she would've been able to conform: to exist without finding trouble and then brutalizing it. The decision that it was best to send her on ops to kill her was enough, and although Six hadn't known of this prerogative by ONI whenever they had hands on with her, she lived for it. Her arrogance would've killed her as a surviving Elite peered out of cover and opened fire.

The plasma shots bounced off her shields as she picked up her Assault Rifle again, slamming in a new mag, bringing it to bear at the walking silver Elite, breaking its shields as she dumped the mag into it, bullets breaking into its torso and through its neck as it fell.

The sound of an Energy Sword popping behind her filled her ears. She immediately threw her shoulder toward the sound, finding the hard body of an Elite and breaking its shields as she heard the sound of flesh on metal, then thrown to the ground: It was JD, having taken the Elite by its midsection and on its back. His pistol came out and put a bullet in its head while it was on the ground.

Plasma shots again from the tree line, hitting Six and her quickly weakening shields as JD took cover behind her, only to emerge and unload toward the source of fire as Six reloaded her AR. Another flurry of blue plasma flew over their heads, Six going to return fire when JD could not. Together two bodies of Elites slumped out of their cover, but more remained.

They were more than willing to oblige.

* * *

Usze hadn't remembered the last time he had been immersed. His kind, once, given their evolution, was paired with the ancient seas of Sangheilios, rough waters and seafaring being once, at a point in their ancient history, one bound by waves and storms. Usze wasn't a part of that generation however as he had scrambled for air and to get the damnable salty taste of grit and sand out of his mouth as his body found itself drawn to a beach.

Breath was never so sweet, and the Great Journey eluded him this day as the waters had carried him, miraculously, from A Long Night of Solace and outwards toward a beach. He had scanned left and right and forward, bodies, not drowned. They had been killed by gunfire and explosives. His waterlogged senses returned to him as he damned fate that there had been no cover, but as he took his bearing he realized that this was only what was left in the wake of a different storm.

His ear canals were cleared with a smack to his head, his rifle held at his hip as he heard the drone of Phantoms and Spirits above. The evacuation efforts had gone well apparently, looking back he had been presented with a site he had never thought he'd be alive to see:

A CSO-Class carrier downed seemingly kilometers away. A monument to the transgressions of the heretical humans.

His claws closed in a fist as he realized that there were more survivors around him, in fact, there had been troops staring down the forest and looking into it as he realized what he was hearing in the distance: gunfire.

Around him dozens of his brothers, spiting up water, and eventually rising as Unggoy and Kig-Yar accrued around them naturally.

"What is this fighting?" Usze asked urgently, turning over other Elites and checking them for wounds. It'd be a shame if they bled from planetfall, for the battle was ahead of them.

"_**A Demon and her Imp!**_" One of the Unggoy Minors had scratched out.

"A Demon?! Here?!" Phantoms and Spirits had found them at that beach, troops slowly being deposited and reconvening, ready for a fight.

The Spartans were known by very little other names by the Covenant. The iron clad monsters of man that alone were able to challenge the Covenant. How many of his brothers had been killed because of them? Lives lost, missions failed, the rug slid out from under them because of the Demons. As they had learned from their time over that human world of Reach, apparently it had been their home, for the Demons they encountered there had fought far more horrifically, far worse than any time in the past they had been encountered.

He felt the wetness of cold steel in his grip, his sword unhooked from his armor.

He had waited all his life for this.

* * *

The way flesh sizzled after being exposed to a plasma bolt was something JD never had to see until he held down a Plasma Pistol's charge and held it to the face of a Jackal, basically melting its face off as he used his other hand to melt a group of grunts with his SMG.

A loud crunch, the crack, of a Jiralhanae skull being split in two by the jaw was provided by Six as she had a boot down the Brute's mouth and two Spikers in her hand, peppering the fire around them as they both clicked empty.

JD had dropped his SMG entirely as Six picked him up and threw him behind cover, the danger being a plasma grenade he hadn't seen. Their world was an ever-encompassing jungle with the occasional alien trespasser, and it both ran them ragged as the mere seconds of combat lull allowed them time to give them heavy breaths.

"You good?!" She raggedly said, both on their back in that decline that provided them cover in that jungle. All he did was cock his pistol in response, peering up and over and getting a bolt from a needle rifle ricochet in front of him for his efforts.

She was good with her hands, her knife, the tools that didn't require gunpowder and a rifle. She'd forgotten when the weapon in her hand was only left as a knife and her instincts took over, going from Covenant to Covenant in the brush and slitting throats, arteries, and tearing ribbons into flesh. She was in her element and, if it hadn't been for the property of her shields sizzling away any foreign organic matter, she would've been coated in blood.

JD on the other hand had been more pragmatic as he peaked again, emptying his pistol mag as he heard a Brute cry out in pain in the forest, the magazine dropped a reloaded with one of his few spare. As he did Six had shuffled over, grabbing his belt only to replace the empty pistol magazine holders with her own stock of pistol ammo. He needed it more than her.

His VISR silhouetted what it could but a firing line was forming and their backs were against the wall: the sheer cliff behind them and the Covenant to their front. Still if they were going to kick the bucket it'd be in this traditional way and not done in by FTL fuckery.

A plasma bolt had bit through JD's torso and armor, he getting knocked down back into cover as he handed the pistol back to Six in pain. She took it firing precisely back at the rampant fire above them as he regained his breath, the burn of the shot settling. Anything to distract himself he realized. He looked up to her. Words could distract him from the pain as he dropped his pack with a quick release, fumbling for his biofoam dispenser and smearing his palm, reaching that palm through the layers of BDU and armor to smear where it burned.

Thankfully his armor was designed to cut down on the heat, the energy of a plasma bolt hitting dead center. It dissipated it throughout but it hurt like hell. If more shots had hit him it'd have been over, but he was lucky then.

"So is it true?" When he spoke Six had flinched for only a second, not expecting him to talk.

"What?" She asked back, an Elite trying to step forward from its foliage cover only to have five shots emptied into it, ending its life. His breaths were rapid, grunting through the pain.

"Spartans never die?"

Two Needler rounds stuck to her shield barrier, fragmenting as her entire form flared golden, ducking back down and handing off the pistol back JD, his breathing normalized.

"_**I didn't.**_" She snapped back quietly, reminding them, for a small moment, of the mission that brought them here.

The slide on the pistol was locked back as he felt for another mag, thankfully there was one. What ammo he did have however wouldn't last him long, and if he were to make a play toward a dropped weapon he might've just shot himself.

"Not so fast." He pushed underneath his breath, looking over cover again for his SMG. He still had ammo for it and damned if he didn't want it back.

Six was already on it as two radically different grenades were in her hands. She'd been using a Brute Spike Grenade as a club for the last few minutes to ample effect based on how… wet its head had been. Its time was up however as she had hooked a frag grenade onto its spikes and thrown it out into the crowd.

The way hot metal and the sheer irony of Brutes getting torn up by their own weapons was always a pleasure to see by any UNSC infantryman, but it was a sight that they could not have as the return intensified as debris from the amplified blast rained back on them.

A chunk of debris had landed on JD's head, the man panicking for a moment before realizing what it was: a Plasma Pistol.

He popped the cover to the heating coils, checking to see if it was still good. Ready to good it was in his hands, Six patting his shoulder once before pointing to his battle belt and two containers that gleamed of orange. He knew what to do immediately.

Their lack of verbal communication, and yet abundance of communication, spoke to something inherent to both of them. Either by training or by torture via this war, they spoke a language of actions, not words. No words could be spared as a gleaming silver Elite broke through the tree line, its face bleeding from the shrapnel of the Brute Spike Grenade. An energy sword in its hand had been alive and ready for the blood of men. Still the two troopers in question charged out and over as JD had held the trigger of his Plasma Pistol.

The charged plasma bolt flew, hitting the silver Elite, sparks flying as its shields dissipated. Six had made the dash for it as JD appeared up from his cover and squared his feet, aiming not with his smart link, but his eyes. The three shots rang out and its helmet was pierced, plasma bolts tracking Six as she had taken the limp Elite's body on its way down and used it as a meat shield, her hands gripping the handle of the energy sword.

JD had dashed up as fire was drawn on Six, going to his belt, feeling for two lukewarm cylinders of napalm like fluid he had taken from a Brute minutes ago. Brute Incendiary Grenades were always volatile, dangerous to use, but dangerous was what they needed and dangerous was what he was going to do as he ran to the forest with one grenade in hand and the other around his pistol. He was lobbing this one deep, running right back to the tree line.

It would've been the end of him as the glass breaking sound of another energy sword popping was heard right in front of him, the hand that lit it just held out and ready for JD to throw himself upon it. JD's momentum was too strong, too fast. Six was faster on the draw however as another energy sword was thrown at it, knocking it out of JD's way as he fell onto his ass.

"Light it JD!" Six had screamed out as he saw fully who had almost killed him: a crimson armored Elite. He had gotten back on his feet as he littered said Elite with shots from his pistol, throwing the firebomb into the forest, backing up until Six had tapped his shoulder, throwing the remaining firebomb.

The fire was fast, napalm, or whatever equivalent that the Covenant had created, did wonders on the ample amount of foliage offered there. The fire started fast, started hard, and with the way the more alien shapes had danced around it had quickly spread to those who had used that same trees for cover. Six had recovered a Plasma Rifle as she and JD cautiously backed up from the tree line, snapping to their right when a figure on fire emerged from it: They felt sorry for the Brutes and their naturally furry bodies. It meant the worst for them as they burned, and the pair wasn't willing to waste ammo on mercy.

One by one Covenant had burst from the tree line, on fire, no threat, shields being broken and flesh sizzling. Still despite this enemy fire had broken through the flame, causing the ODST and Spartan to take a knee and minimize their forms, firing back through the flames. For two with their backs against the walls they had handled okay.

One Elite had the mettle to break through their efforts however: like an acrobat it had leapt through the flames and diving right in front of the pair too fast for any of them to react appropriately.

It was the same Crimson Elite.

Six was quick on the draw, her knife out, going down to stab the Elite before it took to its feet again, but it anticipated this. A quick slash of its sword came too close to her midsection as JD moved around and forward, making sure no other enemy capitalized on the Elite's push.

The fire had only intensified as JD's hand found his M7 on the ground, scooping it, taking a knee and firing through the kicked-up flames. Flesh was torn up by his rounds if they hadn't been scorched, leaves and wood catching fire as, for a moment, he allowed himself to look behind him. A round house kick from Six had been delivered to the Elite's jaw, but that was returned only in kind with an arm, smacked across her head.

Stumbling back Six had spit up on the inside of her helmet, feeling a tooth loose, but it was no matter, her knife changing hands, changing stance.

"Don't worry about me! Keep our 12 o'clock covered!" She spit out, barely coherent as the Elite stood on its two legs after slacking its jaw back straight, the Spartan and it rotating around themselves like gladiators in the pit.

Every piece of his body wanted to do otherwise, but he abided as he brought his M7S to the crook of his shoulder and kept firing into the flames and into bodies past that.

The sound of an energy sword being ignited behind him had made JD, with all his might, to turn around and look, but he kept his sector covered as he had used his feet to shove a Spiker into arm's reach.

There was something special to Six that had made her the way she was. Hyper Lethal was right. How she attained that however…

Spartans never die. They were made. Trained to fight dirty, to fight an unfair fight. Unusual tactics, sheer willpower and overwhelming strength. Every fight an asymmetric one, and, by all means possible, made by any form to be in the Spartan's favor. These were rules that Six had followed ever since she had donned that armor. She was capable of, horrifyingly though, _**something more**_.

Sangheili were a warrior race at their core. Evolution gifted them with lean, almost royally held bodies meant for warfare and combat. Predators from birth, and fluid and graceful with every step they took. There was a reason why they were called Elites by the UNSC: this one especially so as Six viewed through her visor, arms up and braced, yet hands open like claws.

Taller than her. Least by a foot, as per usual. A dark maroon, the color of blood... Covenant Spec Ops. She recognized them before on missions that took her to Covenant facilities where HVTs were common. It was the longest she had ever stared, eye to eye, with a Sangheili, this close. Usually she had a shotgun or at least a gun to deal with the alien, but all she had was her knife.

The Elite lunged, sword out, aimed for Six's head as she peddled back, waiting for the Elite to stretch its reach out. It did not however, too trained to let it be open for an attack like that as it also pulled back, stepping to the side and holding the blade horizontal and stepping forward again, slashing out.

She ducked underneath the swing, seizing the outstretched arm, and holding it over her back. A curled fist came into her midsection, but her free arm with its knife slashed down on the punching arm's skin, cutting through the Elite's under suit and drawing blood.

Rolling over and still in pain Six fell onto her back, dragging the Elite with her and throwing it over her back. Still however the sword would not be let go by it.

She had let go after she heard the Elite lose the breath in its lungs, trying to mount him with the intent to pummel. It would not let that be as its other hand lashed out with a wrist mounted energy dagger in his armor. Rolling over he had grabbed Six by her midsection, holding her up with one hand as its hand reached back, ready to stab through her with the sword.

Her legs reached up, kicking into the armor plates of his torso as it was sent back, she finding the ground again on her two feet. She did a quick glance around.

JD was still firing into the forest and keeping the rest at bay, her discarded, but still partially charged Spartan Laser a few feet away.

As she was turned away legs came to kick into her head again, sending her stumbling back as she felt her nose inundate with blood. She tasted the iron in her mouth as she used the tumble to track closer to the Spartan Laser. The vibrating, sizzling sound of the energy sword nearing her in a slash was heard as Spartan Time kicked in again, her body throwing itself away as she dived away from a slash, spinning on her heels again with her knife and fists out.

They rotated around each other, the Elite breathing hard in its combat state, both hands coming to grip the handle of the energy sword as he readied for a lunge, arms pulled back and next to its head. If the energy sword was horns, it was like a bull.

Naturally Six had charged first, surprising the Crimson Elite as it also charged the few meters between them. She was smaller than him, his sword angled down as they met in the middle. His size betrayed him as the natural curvature of his aim played into Six's duck, coming underneath his outstretched arms as he charged.

Her knife and arm came up, wedging into the palm of the Elite, fingers unraveling off the Energy Sword as she hooked it with the knife and threw it into the forest. In the flash of bloody pain the Elite had closed its eyes, winced, and left itself open for Six to rise, bringing and uppercut to the Elite's head and putting him on his back.

Six thought the fight done with that as she retreated away to the Spartan Laser. For a moment, she thought of what name this Elite had. The Elites themselves knew of the basic English that had become UNSC standard just by pure battle pragmatics alone: being able to hear and read the enemy's callouts and captured intelligence, but if she guessed if she gave the Elite time to speak before it died it would probably just spout incoherent Sangheili curses at her.

She guessed wrong however. _**Usze Tahamee**_ might've very well died on his back by her hand, but he'd do it with dignity, and he'd go down fighting still. She scooped up the Spartan Laser as Usze raised himself up, winds barely recovered, but lost again as a block of weaponized metal and electronics slammed against his head and sent him back down.

The trigger was held through the swing to charge up the laser, Usze knocked onto his back as Six aimed the Spartan Laser right down onto him. His legs reached out with all their might and reach, weapon's aim off, the weight of his force sending it aimed right at the sky as it fired its shot out into the forever of space, and then back down into the forest as it landed on the ground.

She bellowed a scream in anger and frustration, knife in her hands again and diving as she collapsed herself upon him. Her arms were caught by the Elite, saving him from death for a few seconds more as they fought each other with the very edges of their strength, the blade inching closer and closer to flesh, concentration on staying alive on both of their minds. Slowly, slowly, the blade was lowered. Slowly, slowly, Usze forced all of his strength into the grip of one hand only as the other struggled to go at her neck.

Six held the knife across the Elite's snout, pressing down, breaking skin, but not enough strength to push all the way through. On the flipside the energy dagger from Usze's wrists had been flared at her neck. That would've been the end for them both, but brute force had intervened. It manifested in the boot of an unknown soldier, followed by more.

Moments earlier JD's SMG had just run out of ammo as a Brute reared its burnt head out of the fiery tree line, roaring at him and ready to charge. Not enough time to reload, and his sidearm was out. He didn't expect some sort of blue energy wave to swipe in front of him and the forest, throwing the Brute like a ragdoll along with the rest of the Covenant in the tree line. It put out the fire too, and when he looked to see who it was he saw troopers, humans, but none like that he'd ever seen. One of those troopers had his hands alight with blue flame.

JD had already been on his knees, these strange human soldiers come to them, guns raised from an angle that they got the jump on both the Covenant and them.

Insurrectionists? The ODST thought. It was fair. But usually they just dressed in fatigues stolen from the UNSC or in civilian clothes. The shuttle that they came in on, and there were more coming, hadn't been any he had seen before.

He wasn't given the chance to look as two soldiers kicked his weapons away, only to handcuff him, helmet to the floor.

They had a lot more trouble with the Elite and the Spartan however. Not as she stood up, even with rifles pointed at her, and looked at the Elite who had now been feet away. She touched upon her throat, feeling the plasma singing from the blade that nearly went in. The Elite had done the same with its face, feeling the cross mark on his nose and drawing away with blood. The two held their gaze, even as the soldiers around them pointed their guns and yelled at them to get down.

Usze was perplexed however, the humans were aiming their guns even at the demon. Was she not one of their champions?

"Get down on your knees!"

One of the soldiers went to kick Six's leg in to get her on her knees, she only paying attention to them in the peripheral, but it didn't give. All that that served to do was crunch the boot of the soldier as she herself, willingly, got on her knees. "Spartan B-312. _**Lieutenant Gul**_. Are we still in UNSC space?"

She towered over the men, staring them down at least a head taller. It was if she was talking gibberish she noticed, their bewilderment behind their helmets taken in by her senses as she saw armor and equipment unlike she'd ever seen before. More specifically she had been more concerned as to why they hadn't put a bullet in the back of the Elite that still stood across from her.

"I said get down on your knees!" One of the humans said in an English that was very much her own.

If her eyes were to be seen past her visor, they would've spelled disbelief. She could've killed everyone in a six-foot radius around her and yet… They didn't know.

A muffled voice from behind her. It was JD. "Comply, Six." A rifle to the back of his head as she saw him, face first, on the ground, cuffed. "This ain't our territory."

Whether he meant UNSC or otherwise, she understood why he spoke up. He wasn't dying on her part. Before the Elite had the same time to fully take in the situation steel, magnetic, blocky cuffs were around his legs as his hands were immediately bound, brought to the floor as Six conceded and kneeled.

"The Hell are you wearing? Are you a mech?" One of the soldiers asked her, point blank. She didn't answer. JD did however.

"She's human." He said quickly, transferring thoughts over while he was still able to speak. "Who are you?!"

"We're _**System Alliance Marines**_, of course," The captain of the group said as if there was any other option. "And you're being held until further notice until we can find out what the Hell you guys did."

She looked at the Captain, and then a black armored trooper that seemed so unimpressed with the battle around them. No cool was lost, and she saw the smug scowl on his face past his greying shave. Across the heart of his armor: N7.

It went against her mortal instinct, to sit there and let pairs and pairs of bracers tie her arms and legs together, behind her back, but the same was being done for the Elite across from them, the Marines all going to the bodies of the Covenant around them and looking them over, wide eyed.

The ODST's helmet was torn off him, revealing his face, breathing in unfiltered air as he was hauled up. Dirty and unkept hair sticky with sweat and grime, a dirty light brown. His eyes were unprepared to see the same happen to the Spartan before him, for it was never something he could considered to ever be done. They locked her like a statue with all the restraints, and so she could do nothing as they found the pressure latch on her helmet and raised it up and out. ODSTs and Spartans alike had sometimes preferred to wear flame retardant balaclavas, even beneath their helmets. Six was one of said people. Now however JD, and the Marines that came from them from this "System Alliance" could see her eyes in the thin gap of fabric that revealed some of her face: they were strikingly blue, unnaturally.

"Christ. Her eyes are as blue as an Asari's ass captain." One of the soldiers responded crudely before the sound of Plasma fire, unfamiliar to them, but familiar to the two UNSC personnel, had racked out in the distance.

Usze had squirmed and tried to shove off, but the bindings had been too tight as the Marines looked down upon him like a caught prey. Bewilderment was within their faces. On the way to these two humans, they had come across their handiwork. Bodies and bodies of the dead, almost as varied as those species already known to the Council: bullet casings left behind, an unusual sight in that day of age for them. It spoke to primitive forms of warfare in regards to firearms, and seeing those done in by knife and dagger, something was indeed very primitive about the armored soldiers. The squid-jawed alien was massive: the body of a fighter that took five Marines to settle.

"Go! Get them onto the shuttle!" The man in black walked over to Six, towering over her in her moment of weakness and restraint. He reached out, grabbing her shoulder and walking her up, only to stop at the Elite and do the same as she heard other these other "System Alliance" Marines go into the forest and deal with the Covenant as they did them. This greying man had the mettle to take two unknowns into his hand and forcibly walk them through the forest. She could find respect in that, but it didn't help their situation or their understanding thereof. She craned her head back, looking for JD. She was thankful that he was in her tracks following her, but his gaze was instead focused on the Elite that was being brought with them. He was not the first to note the pure seething aura between both of them, but that was why the man in black, this N7, put himself in between them as they emerged into a clearing: It was a makeshift LZ as, above, hundreds of other Systems Alliance shuttles came down on them as Phantoms and Spirits were forced down.

It wasn't the relief or help that the two UNSC soldiers wanted or needed, but it's what they had to deal with as the high of combat was replaced with the unease of the unknown. At least for JD that is, Six keeping her eyes locked with the Elite.

The Marines saw the electricity between the Elite and the robot-like Spartan, how they were both frothing at the mouth, bleeding from what cuts they had. Literally they had heard the growls and the snarls from both the alien and her. They both wanted each other dead in a way that none had ever seen before.

_"Jesus what the Hell is that?"_

_"is that what a Geth looks like?"_

_"Look at its mouth!"_

The Marines yet to move out all had their hushed and whispered comments as they saw something far too momentous, far too alien to understand at a glance. They all would eventually know what it was like to see what Covenant looked like up close in the following hours.

The blue Kodiak shuttle was their destination as JD, Six, and Usze were thrown in with ample Marine guard, the N7 still sitting between Six and the Elite.

When the doors sealed they both had thrown themselves at each other, regardless of their bindings. It took them all and the ODST to restrain them.

* * *

A/N: A story for fun, addressing problems I have with other Mass Effect x Halo crossovers. More on this when we finish out the intro section. Some things to take note now: a few cheeky things I've done upfront, most namely how I wrote out Six's final stand from Reach, only to have JD save her bum.

See you in a bit.


	2. 0-2: More than Human

* * *

They stripped her bare, and in that moment the Covenant, the Alliance Marines, and the ODST were finally given an answer to a question that had evaded them all for either nearly three decades or half an hour. They stripped her bare and even the Elites, with their lack of knowledge of human pleasantries and social constructs, cringed and looked away after they had seen enough.

They held her down and stripped her bare and she felt violated in every form.

She didn't even make a noise as her eyes shot death at those that did the deed.

MJOLNIR was a set of armor, a mix and matchable system that could be, even by one person (often the wearer) upgraded, retrofitted, and handled. The actual armored parts of it, plates and metal, helmet and gauntlets and boots and every piece of material that had cost the value of a spaceship were all shed off of Six at gun point and by force. Not by her own hands until she was left with nothing but her skinsuit that hid nothing of her form save the bare skin.

It was if she was forcibly molted, the arrangement of her armor rearranged on the floor like a body in that makeshift containment cell's block, outside the glass walls of the cell they shared.

Of the many mysteries that fell onto the planet Altis, she was one of them.

And yet her disrobing of MJOLNIR had answered a question that the Alliance Marines and Officers there had not yet asked but held by those not from that world.

Usze Tahamee had stood across the humans in another glass cell across the hall, several Elites also thrown in there with them, bare without even a cloth. He refused to sit. Sitting was a state of weakness and he did not need to show weakness here.

"Hmph." He grunted, now knowing an answer that he perhaps wouldn't have known in a normal world, looking into that glass hall at the woman within the armor. "Only human." His face continued to bleed, no treatment given, but it wouldn't kill him. It'd leave a scar.

They were the first prisoners to come to that waterlogged city's makeshift mass containment center: a giant emporium meant for fishermen to auction off their catches. It smelt of salt and dankness, but when the equipment arrived to erect giant glass boxes to throw them into, the smell had been hidden behind what JD could only discern as a HAZMAT styled ventilated scrub down. That wasn't what he was trying to deduce however.

What had really stayed his thoughts before he had to bear witness to Six being forced to shed the fortress from her skin was why they were being treated the same as the Covenant. Just behind that question had been why the Covenant hadn't just been shot dead by these other humans, these other "Marines".

She had walked back into the cell, eyes down, head hung low as her arms crossed each other and she held herself. She felt naked, and she wasn't that far off from being so.

JD felt bad however when this thought crossed by his mind: If he had been an Insurrectionist that had come across a Spartan and captured them, would he not want the same measures of protection? They had given him the courtesy of his own modesty however after a very through pat down. He cooperated, but it meant very little when Six hadn't been. All that he had been left with was his emptied combat BDU pants and his Marine Olive Drab shirt tucked into it. Even his belt had been taken, his dog-tags taken as well. Six however, had none.

His body was a weapon, he knew that, he filled out as well as any ODST and it showed in his arms and worn hands, core, maybe not a pristine set of muscled abs, but he had been full-bodied. His form however could not bear comparison to what Six's current state told:

The abs of her suit had, at first, seemed like they were molded and formed onto the suit, however a cursory glance had rendered that a wrong assumption.

It was not male gaze which had made JD run his vision down her body once. No, it was the curious gaze of a UNSC service member who had been given the opportunity to see a Spartan as they were: human.

She had almost unnaturally been formed and tight, her own muscles framed by her body suit toned and bulging and certainly screamed of threatening. He tried not to stare but it was impossible. Out of her armor the difference in height was still skewed toward her but not by much, her skin pale as all hell, despite its natural, dark complexion. Not naturally, not healthily. How often that armor was taken off her, he thought. Judging by the way she held herself, unsure of what to do, having that armor off made her feel as if naked, it hadn't been an often occurrence he imagined. Her hair was defiantly dark, her eyes shockingly blue, almost unnaturally. Her hair was long, dirty and uncleaned and uncared for, cascading over her shoulders and in front of her face as she fidgeted to clear it of the strands. Her face, twitching, contorting, running through emotions, the cell, tactically evaluating where she was. Hers was a very feminine face, lips thin, high cheeks, small nose.

She was uncomfortable, under threat, and unknowing of what to do as she moved herself into a corner, a rudimentary bench along the wall that couldn't be broken or toyed with to create any sort of instrument or tool.

JD had naturally taken off his pants.

The first emotion that he had seen on her face after her very warranted unease walking back into the cell had been shock at him, eyes going wide before getting defensive. JD had worked his pants off fast however, backing off into his own corner, boxer-clad ass against the glass. One hand had been up at her pleading, his face twisting into panic, the other had offered his pants.

She rose a thin eyebrow before understanding, raising her own hands calmingly at him. He was thankful she understood, any hit from her in the chest region would've agitated the plasma burn.

"No… no, it's fine." She said softly, uneasily. "I'm just… unnerved." She said it distantly, but JD understood, nodding, pants going back on, looking over his shoulder to five or so of those "Alliance" Marines looking at him and her in between documenting and taking photos of her armor.

"I-" she started slowly, sitting down, using one sleeved hand to throw as much of her hair behind her head and shoulders. "Understand why they would do this."

For the brief second, they had opened that glass door that allowed access to this cell to get her back in, a blast of sound and Covenant screaming for the head of the humans that now captured them had came in. This cell was dampened of sound from the outside, and the silence inside would've been maddening. The two of them had thrived via quiet however. It allowed them to think as they looked over the odd armor of the Marines before them, seeing the insignias on their head gear. A split arch with three stars below them.

Six had done Insurrectionist ops, she had made entire militia groups disappear and yet she had never seen that type of insignia before. Neither had JD. None of what they saw felt or heard could be remotely described to as familiar, and being treated like this was worrying, disconcerting.

They avoided eye contact with the Elites across from them, and the Elites did the same, however from the brief moments Six had paid attention during her violation, she had seen the cells around them filled per species, as best they could without overflowing.

Words whispered, Marines speaking candidly, her hearing could tell. These people did not know who the Covenant were.

JD had come to the same conclusion.

How nice it would've been, he thought, to _**not know**_ what the Covenant was.

* * *

The tallest building of the Altis Colony had been the planetary headquarters of the Aquasola Corporation that was present on the planet. On a world that had already been developed and occupied desalination of water was nice in a drought, however otherwise costly and inefficient compared to proper recycling and conservation of water in industry and consumer goods. This was true for Earth or Terra Nova. However desalination of water on Altis, who had no shortage of water as an oceanic planet, and having it shipped out to the colonies along the Attican Traverse was a more realistic solution for those without water resources.

Altis was known for being a reservoir for a parched human frontiersman, but today that would change. That much David Anderson could tell as he made his Command Post on one of the top floors. Object Alpha had touched down close enough to the Altis Colony that clear and worthwhile observation could be observed with nothing more than powered binoculars.

The rest of the city had been co-opted into a giant military firebase, every open area not destroyed by the initial tsunami that swept in and roared through the colony: every building with enough space set up for operations or containment and HAZMAT for every single species that they got a jump on and pacified.

In a normal first contact situation, if there was one, there would be more formality, less man handling, however this situation was… extra ordinary.

For all intents and purposes these new aliens had not acted as if that them, the humans, had been new. They were familiar to them even, and on their tongues hatefully spun, as some fireteams came to know, the name of their species was yelled at them: Human.

And they responded with lethal force.

They weren't mindless like drones, and they weren't striking out in fear. They were intelligent, capable of warfare and technical marvels as the purple and pink ships flew in an airspace around Alpha and the other notable pieces of debris of their make that had come down.

Object Charlie, the grey and black ship that had been obviously destroyed in battle, its wreck had stayed in orbit, outside of gravity's pull, and the SSV Vladivostok had already been deploying EVA crews to contain that wreckage. An easy job, even with the radiation and inherent danger of battlefield wrecks, compared to the mess that was happening planetside.

The immediate debris field of note that had matched Object Alpha, or had come from Object Alpha, had covered the area the size of the old American state of Hawaii. The only solace that any place that the survivors of Alpha's wreck had been able to take however, and to Anderson's benefit, that there was little land to effectively gather on, and more often then not they had been collected and returned to Alpha via its hanger bays above water or on the surface of it itself.

There were still notably large islands that debris and survivors did come upon, as was where the two human survivors of that debris field had come from and that had been the complicated part.

Alliance Marines had touched down when they could, and they met, gun to gun, firefight to firefight, a union of aliens that did not want their help and seemed to want them all dead.

Combat casualties had been in the dozens already. Mostly wounded, but some KIA, weapons that could only be compared to the ancient reports of the Geth by the Quarians. Pure energy fired, plasma weapons, and, when the first scans were made, an impossible truth revealed:

Not one speck of Element Zero among any of it. From the smallest pistol to the wreck of Alpha itself, all of it devoid of something so integral to space flight.

That did not mean them untouched by those weapons powered by Eezo, and soon enough Marine fireteams had reported their first successful engagements. Some of the Marine leads had wanted to push on, but Anderson had kept that want down. This was First Contact, not a declaration of war. He had made Commander Ryder swear on that.

"These unknowns, they seem to be keeping a defensive perimeter around Alpha and extending no further. Their recovering personnel and equipment from the sea and bringing them back to it."

Anderson had peered through his binoculars and commented to his staff. A sniper also perched on the window of that conference room also confirming with a nod.

"Those shuttles, definitely military types. Both have notable turrets and gun ports."

There were hundreds in the air, grounding Alliance shuttle traffic down to outside of their range, and so avoiding the risk of stranding Marines he had made the call to evacuate all Marine deployments to the islands that were nearby and set up their own exclusion perimeter.

"They're moving back in, not out." Anderson was there on the ground on Shanxi. When his Marines had to move back, the Turians had filled in without pause, and it was a sound military maneuver that anyone with any sort of tactical command would've made if aggression was their aim. "They're not interesting in engaging us. This is all in self-defense."

It wasn't as much as an epiphany as much as it was an observation.

But even then, self-defense didn't seem right, not when reports from the front talked of such beasts like the giant apes or the worm like abominations with giant green cannons on their arms.

Still they were holding back, not pressing the attack, and that was why Anderson didn't feel threatened being so exposed in that tower.

"Casualties?" He asked aloud. One of his Radio Transmissions Officers, an RTO, responded back.

"56 and rising. 20 confirmed KIA."

Most of the KIAs had come from shot down shuttles, the rest: burned by plasma or shot with strange, weaponized pink Crystals that had combined and then exploded.

Space-to-ground bombardment wasn't within the MO, otherwise Anderson would've called for that already. That was the state of his mind however, caught between First Contact and Conflict. Still when the order was given for the Marines to pull back, so too had the aliens. A staring match to be sure as the rest of the Fifth Fleet stayed in orbit and either enforced the blockade, started combing the debris field, or kept the evacuation of Altis's meek several hundred thousand population going. The civilian freighters that had come to Perugia's aid had now been tasked with ferrying civilian evacuees off planet and to Arcturus Station for relocation and temporary housing. The Department of Colonial Affairs would have to shell out insurance by the millions to reimburse the colonists of Altis, however for the immediate future given the circumstances, Altis was off limits.

Shaw, given purview of ground operations, had made the orders clear as soon as the Marines pulled back: _"Contain the threat, deescalate by avoiding confrontation, and capture those who are alive and have fired upon us."_

Any indication that these new contacts had picked up Hackett's declaration of intent and greetings was nill, and that meant Commander Ryder had played it by ear.

Anderson had detested the fact that it had been Ryder out on the field given his record and not his XO, whom he had been grooming for months, however she had been back on Earth finishing the last of her leave. Ryder was abrasive, but effective, and so according to the tactical map set up for Anderson, it meant he and his assigned Marine fireteam remained on the island after they had dropped off the two humans.

If he wasn't going to be the first one to shake hands with an alien, Anderson grimly thought, he would be the first to be a victor over them.

"How's our prisoner count coming along?" Anderson asked again as he went to the opposite side of the room, a view of the fish market below being peered down on. The RTO responded just as fast. It felt particularly cruel to refer to those captured as prisoners: as in the Alliance was subjugating them, however there was no other word for it.

"Sixty five and counting. Five total different species we have among them."

"Out of what?"

"Eight observed." The RTO had slowly reconsidered his words as they left his mouth. There was a technicality. "Well, nine, given our two humans downstairs."

"Any identification on them?" Anderson pressed, his arm going alight with an orange, holographic interface: on his Omni-tool's UI a video feed of their cell had been displayed: the two humans idly waiting as best they could in their circumstances. The male had his back against the wall, dozing, the female: stripped down to what had been some sort of thermal underlay for her incredibly heavy armor, she was pacing back and forth in the small space, like a caged lion eyeing all those who came past.

"We found a pair of dog-tags on the male. Info reads as a "_**J. J. Durante**_. We ran his numbers and name through AWOL listings, but nothing came up… that and the service numbers are so far out of serial. That's not the most interesting part however-"

_ **"UNSC?"** _

Anderson had been given a picture of those dog-tags as well, shown on that orange tinted screen. On one side of the tags that hadn't been his biographical details was a symbol he had never seen before, labeled with four letters along a banner. A bird of prey had been perched over a gridded world.

"It doesn't match any known mercenary or splinter groups commander, and quite frankly, it seems a little too military to be any one of them."

"But their both obviously trained. So where did they come from? One of the human supremacy groups?"

Human supremacy advocacy groups had been a dime a dozen since the First Contact War and the Skyllian Blitz, but most had acted more politically, not willing to go gun to gun with any of the Citadel Species or those left out. Maybe, Anderson thought, that these had been disenfranchised Marines. The armor of the female had made sense then. Exo-suit technology had been outdated in humanity's past: expensive and unwieldy to use, however when applied correctly would give any run of the mill human the ability to rough up a few aliens.

"It'd make sense." The sniper chimed in in a breath. "Word over the comms is that we've got at least eighty KIA aliens on the island they were picked up according to Commander Ryder's team."

What?!

"Just those two alone?" Even in the middle of first contact with multiple alien species, it was always men that seemed like the monsters in outer space. It was fair however. They had the most eminent questions to be asked, and they did speak their language.

In the distance, sounds of gunfire and explosions had persisted, but they had died down as the hive that had been Object Alpha seemed to recall all but the smallest of aerial contacts: most likely fighters to keep up patrol.

Questions came later, Anderson reminded himself as he pressed against the window and looked out. "This is Commander Anderson to all Marine Actuals and Commander Ryder. How copy on enemy resistance?"

* * *

"Please! Please don't kill me!"

A cynical frontiersman of space might've said that this was the best response anyone could ever get when experiencing First Contact. It wasn't as glorious or momentous as Alec Ryder thought it'd be. He figured more flag waving, mountains to climb, or at least, hand shaking.

Instead what he got was a short, squat, bipedal alien with a triangular pack on it, tubes running from it to its mouth. It's voice was scratchy, high, almost like a child. It was very obviously in fear when Ryder had peered into that tipped over shuttle on the beach, a hole in its cockpit made by some superheated plasma, and found it among the survivors.

Perhaps more shocking than that was that it said it in English.

"Shiiiieeet, wha-?"

A Marine had vocalized the obvious confusion as Ryder reached into the transport and pulled the creature out with two hands.

"Please! Don't eat me human! Leave my body whole! Don't mulch me alive! Oh please no!"

Ryder raised his eyebrow behind his helmet, Lancer assault rifle tucked away on his back. They had forced the aliens from this island, but not without casualties or damage, his left thigh having taken a green energy bolt directly, burning, then numbing him as he was caught without cover. Some men had faired worse, their kinetic barriers or biotic shields having failed them as if they hadn't been on at all. The force on that island however was unorganized, obviously still reeling from their planet fall and their engagement with the humans that he had delivered to the Altis Colony.

"What? Those guys eat you? They cannibal or something?" A Marine had helped Ryder off the wreckage with the alien, not needing any bindings as it quaked in its own short body.

"Stow it Marine," He had started, bringing the being down and into the cover on that beach, sand stained colors of blood. Purple and deep reds, their corpses taken by the ocean waves and dragged out. Debris had littered every inch of the ocean in that area, and the bodies didn't help. And on that sandy beach the Alliance Marines had taken firing positions as the shuttles and transports took off back toward Object Alpha, having run them off. Their rifles had been cooling, barrels hot and heavy. Curiosity had killed the cat and yet some of them had reached down and grabbed the weapons and bodies left behind. A giant hammer, the size of two men, was left behind, blades on one side of the head, the other emanating some sort of energy that repulsed any surface that came near. "Bag them up! If I get a misfire that's on you!"

His yelled had disturbed the squat creature even more and they only settled when Ryder had grabbed both of its shoulders. "Oh woe is me! Darkness takes me in the form of this heretic!"

To be fair he and his fireteam had killed maybe a dozen of these aliens on the way here, and judging on how they were ordered around by the squid-headed aliens and the furred apes, they were lowly grunts.

More and more, just based on how these aliens acted in battle alone, this seemed to be a military alliance. Perhaps these things were slaves.

"Calm down. I'm not gonna kill you if you don't give me a reason to." His helmet had come off and into the crook of his arm. "Now who are you, and what's been going on."

"No! No! This Unggoy refuses to converse with a dirty human! Just kill me!"

The M3 Predator had been barely unholstered when the Grunt cried out again.

"Wait! Wait! Wait! This one knows much!"

A curious species to say the least. Who knew cowardice could become a species trait and not one of the individual's. At least he had a name for them now: Unggoy.

"Got another prisoner!" Ryder yelled out to his Fireteam, a Marine picking up the Unggoy like a giant teddy bear and back to the tree line to the shuttle DZ. Most of the prisoners which had been collected that day had come from this horse shoe shaped island- now most of the combat seen by Alliance Marines on the ground too.

They were unhinged, these aliens, as if they needed no introduction to these presumably new enemies that had been humanity. If anything they'd been doing this all their lives.

"This is Commander Anderson to all Marine Actuals and Commander Ryder. How copy on enemy resistance?"

The earpiece in his helmet rung out. "This is Ryder. I've got the island covered beach to beach with my Marines and we've just pushed out the last. I'll be establishing forward observation."

"Copy all Ryder. But remember my orders are to not go any further."

"I'll try Anderson, but you know how a battle goes. If we have to take it to them-"

"I know how you are Ryder, you'd want to put your boots on that damned wreckage and take on whoever's in there but stay put. We might need you for HVT extraction."

"No promises."

"Of course." There was a distinct pause as debris still continued to fall from the sky. "Did you see anything about the human female and male you captured?"

For ten seconds Ryder had come into the clearing and observed that armored woman and the alien fight, throwing punches that would've broken lesser men, fighting in a way that had been too practiced, too familiar to both of them. They fought like masters, and they fought like they had been at war.

The male too, he had held his ground despite it all, not being distracted by his comrade squaring off against the squid-jawed alien, pumping lead into the forest and into aliens expertly. His time to acquire target and squeeze of rounds had been practiced and applied, familiarity with gear something that could only come with time. Both their helmets had been worn and battle scarred, and he had made sure to them back to the HQ.

Further evidence had been the mass of bodies that they had left behind.

"They're both military. Not regular grunts either, they're too hot and high speed to be."

"Yeah, they look it. Anything else?"

Throughout he and his Marines had found traces of the battle that went further than bodies. They found bullet casings. Bullet casings! Scattered weapons that were obviously firearms all bearing the designations of "Misriah Armory" or "Property of the UNSC". The biggest piece of such gear had been the overturned and waterlogged transport aircraft that had been upside down and hung from a tree, its turret on the chin askew. Throughout weapon hard cases had been found, and, within its bay, something disheartening: a small pouch of dog tags.

They all varied in style, either new formatting of dog tags or just hold overs from the years, but one of those dog tags had included a birthdate on its tag. The year on it had read this:

2510.

"They're fish outta water. Treat 'em like first contacts."

* * *

A ship's bridge hadn't been as entirely useful when the ship had been grounded, but it was still a command center if anything, even if the lights were on the verge of going out. Still communications throughout the ship had been resumed from it and the beginning of damage reports had started to come in. Needless to say that when the damage report on the secondary Pinch fusion reactor had come through Shipmistress Karonee had personally gone down there to the cavernous power section to see it with her own eyes, the maintenance Phantom which had been allotted to the engineers to get around that giant open space where the generator was ferrying her, looking out of its bay.

It glowed like a white star between the two gravity manipulators, a constant fusion reaction combing through that star, albeit dimmer than how it usually was.

"Faster Than Air reports that we do have enough coolant to sustain nominal power and operations for several weeks, and the reactor itself has taken little damage. However, our fuel reserves are low, both tritium and deuterium." A Sangheili translator had reiterated to his shipmistress, conveying the words the Huragok in that bay could not.

"Enough to fend off an attack?" She asked most importantly.

The engineer Sangheili had an answer for that, the reactor itself humming lowly as if hungry. It had helped that the engines and repulsors were no longer a factor, nor were the power diverted to the shields that kept the ship in a breathable atmosphere. "If we divert some of the spare fusion reactors from the Phantoms and Spirits, we should be able to power weapons and shields independently for a time, but we need to start recovery operations in repair deck. See if there's anything we could use that was intended for the support fleet's maintenance."

The Phantom swooped around and peering out Karonee had seen the engineering corps with the Huragok crawling around like ants, trying to keep the reactor stable and adjusted for their situation.

"Is this ship not equipped with fabrications for a hydroprocessing planet?"

The engineer nodded as it looked at its Huragok. "Yes, I believe so. We should have the plans at the very least, if not just the raw material to start working on it."

There was water all around them to siphon and process, and that would be key. "So that should be any spare hands focus, getting one set up just outside. We'll be able to at least keep ourselves running in the long term, that is if those blasted humans don't try to move in on us."

"It shall be done." With an affirming nod the Phantom was brought back around to its dock Karonee stepping off as the Phantom went back off. The entire ship had been tilted at an ever so slight angle that kept her wary of her foot placement, but the gravity lifts had still accounted for them as she stepped off into one of the pathways and was carried back to the hallways of the ship. It had taken her several years to get used to the size of her CCS-class battlecruiser, the Blood of Union. Even when 2/3rds of the Solace had been lopped off it was still twenty-times the size, and quite frankly her feet getting sore was the last thing she needed.

Still, the walking was needed. To see a Shipmaster or Shipmistress at all was meant that there was someone still in control, and she had taken control. As the masses of the Solace saw her on the halls, they knew that the Covenant was still in order, and regulation and rank still mattered.

Those that hadn't been broken or bleeding went back to their duty stations, ready to fight, and those whose duty stations were lost had prepped for deployment outside of the ship to help rescue and recovery.

She was without an XO right now however, and Usze had gone missing when the ship hit.

She was able however. Able enough to keep commanding a ship, even several million strong.

"Communications up yet?" She asked as she returned to the bridge. For a bunch of Spec Ops jockies, Usze's men had been competent after one or two moments of run down. Usze hadn't been an officer in Solace's detachment for long as she had learned, but he had obvious talent. More befitting an operator than a leader, but he had made it work.

"Yes shipmistress! We've established a battlenet through our remaining nodes, using the transports as relays."

"Very good. High priority message to all on comms. No encryption. _**We'll let whoever these humans are hear it.**_"

No question, no remorse.

The Elite raised a finger signaling she was clear, a chair for Shipmistresses found and put on that top tier of the bridge, she spoke.

"This is the Fleetmaster Seylu Karonee, Commander of the _**Fleet of Shaded Justice**_, Shipmistress of the Blood of Union. I have assumed command of A Long Night of Solace and its remaining complement. All able units are to report to your section leaders at once, and all section leaders are to report to Solace's secondary bridge immediately for briefing and standing orders. Let it be known that even when we've been shot down, this ship will not fall victim to these heretical humans who dare gloat over us now. If they shall come, we shall do whatever is necessary to enact our retributions. We shall yet see the Consecration of the Great Journey! All that matters now however is keeping ourselves alive today! The humans shall have their day, but for now, we need to look inwards, so pay no heed to those above."

A raw roar of the Sangheili in the Bridge had echoed, and as she waited for it to stop echoing, she prepared herself to say it again in the basic human language.

When she delivered it any Alliance VIs or linguists who were trying to decipher any sort of language that had been overheard on the ground or over the air waves had been floored. It was a confirmation to a detail that Marines up and down the exclusion zone had reported:

_ **These aliens spoke the language of man.** _

* * *

"Is that a declaration of hostile intent?" Captain Shaw had heard the statement on all comms, said in English. _**English. **_It had been the common language of mankind at that point, recognized by most aliens just by sound alone. Some within those alien societies had all around declared basic English as the "Human" language, but still some planets and nations had their language strains that patches to the translator software in many devices could provide.

What had been terrifying however was that no translator software was needed. Every linguistics officer doubled checked: the message that came through was the pure sound and audio, not modified by translation software. It meant a familiarity. Friends close, enemies closer. That was the implication.

Words, spoken in a familiar tongue, but alien all the same.

It'd been several hours since Ryder had set up his observation point and it went against the contrary. The unknown ships had started to pull back even more, and even though they had skirted the effective range of any of the Alliance Marines, none had fired upon them, minding their own business as they scanned the waters for survivors and life pods. Ryder had been left idle so he had come back to the colony, interrogating and questioning any alien who would talk to him. Save for a few hold outs, none would as night fell.

Shaw's direct communications had been with Anderson and Hackett, coordinating the response to this planetfall. Hackett had murmured to himself for moments before giving his analysis. "I don't believe so Captain. Not with their actions. Have the Marines reported any hostilities?"

"Anderson?" Shaw bounced down to the planet's surface. The Perugia had taken point over the ground op coordination and Shaw knew what he was doing. The man had been a commander during the Blitz, organizing in much the same way during Torfan. Fortunately for him he hadn't been claimed as the butcher.

"Last engagement was half an hour ago. They're being cautious about hitting us and we're doing the same." Anderson said. He had made trips to the front in the meanwhile, coming back to that tower at a loss of what to do. The problem was that these aliens did not even have First Contact in mind, and with that, the only step that the Alliance could possibly take was to press the assault, but there was no reason to. Even with Marines dead, they too had taken the lives, taken prisoner, the aliens that had come. "What's our move? We don't have anything to do without proper communications, and whoever is in charge over there isn't playing ball."

An impasse. Damnable, but maybe what everyone needed. Let time be the bridge. Neither them or these newly marooned aliens were going anywhere, and eventually someone would bridge the gap willingly.

Shaw had a thought. "Did they just translate our language just now? Or have they known of us, observed us, to know? There's no way they've done it that quick, it took the Turians a week, even with Citadel tech.

Suddenly a comm officer pinged in from the ship closest to the local Relay: SSV Seoul.

"Sir! We have a communication inbound over the relays. Ident reads as from the Citadel."

Hackett nodded. "To me."

"Aye sir."

First Contact like this could never be hidden, and so in the same breath that Hackett had been alerted from Shaw about Object Alpha and its debris field suddenly appearing over Altis, the Admiral had made recommendations for the Systems Alliance Parliament to bounce a message to the Council that a First Contact scenario was underway.

It's not like the Alliance had gained anything about hiding First Contact anyway they assumed, and they needed to gain favor within the Council. Any transparency would've looked good when they were looked over for final deliberations for their member status on the Council. It was better then an STG Team or a Spectre saying that humanity had introduced and harbored a new species.

The message had been static-filled, but it was readable, transmissions sent near a Mass Relay often had been less than crystal. It meant that whoever sent this message had been bouncing from Relay to Relay inbound. Before Hackett had even opened comms he suspected the Council was sending a representative ship their way to Altis.

What they had neglected to alert the Council about however was how tense the situation was and how complicated it was getting between open hostilities and the presumed familiarity every single alien they had seen with humans.

It was a simple voice message sent in a hurry, spoken by a female voice:

_"This is the Asari Ship Open Arms, coming on behalf of the Citadel First Contact Ministry. We are heading _ _ **a small task force** _ _ to you now to your coordinates, please remain in observation and limit diplomatic contact with your encountered species. We look forward to assisting humanity in introducing a new species to the galaxy at large."_

It was tone deaf, ignorant of the situation, but they weren't to blame. This was something that the Council had to see for themselves. Still it had a certain arrogance to it.

"How large was the task force that the Citadel sent for the Yahg? Does anyone remember?" Anderson was reminded of history.

"Records say a few small frigates, mostly with diplomatic and xenologists."

Hackett had felt something in his gut, a buzz on his fingertips. True, all the other aliens were fair game, and perhaps they did need help for them, but there were two humans in that mess that had been treated as First Contacts, and if the Council had implicated humans in something like this... Complications that they didn't need. Humans needed to know human secrets, and perhaps, the two humans were the Alliance's to solve. Having two humans under the scope as if they were First Contact species, while also simultaneously applying for a seat on the Council, wasn't a good image.

What would be worse if it was found out that those two humans, though unlikely, were responsible for this whole mess

There was no need for the Council to deal with a species already known to them.

"We need to get those two humans out of the area and back to Arcturus. We can't have them mixed up into whatever the Council will stir up here." Hackett's resolve was urgent, pleading.

"…They're inbound fast Admiral. We don't have a ship to split off without attracting attention, and the civilian freighters just jumped." An ensign advised.

Anderson knew better. Sure, the solution he was thinking of would throw an entire engineer corps' timeline off, but there was no reason it wouldn't be a reasonable answer. In fact, it was warranted. "We do have a ship that'll do what we need."

It was a new frigate, a first in the class, developed jointly with the Turian Hierarchy as a message of trust and cooperation between them and the Alliance. It was fast, it was quiet, and it could leave without anyone noticing: especially inbound Citadel traffic.

Hackett knew what Anderson was implying. That ship was parked within the Killimanjaro's bays right now. "Right. Someone get First Lieutenant Moreau and any of the crew slated for Anderson's ship to ready stations right now."

Anderson had made for the elevator after assigning an adjunct commander in his place. "Commander Ryder, report to the prisoner holding cells immediately, we need to exfiltrate ASAP."

* * *

Same cell at least. A small concession, seeing as so many prisoners had just been taken, they among them. But it made sense in just pure categorical organization, they were both human and not currently at each other's neck.

At the current moment however, it was just her.

She had looked away for a minute, and she had found JD slumped against the wall asleep peacefully. At first she had been concerned that they were pumping sleeping gas into their cell to pacify them, but none had come. She had internally raised an eyebrow. For being in such a situation under duress he had fallen asleep quite easily.

Her "shoes", or at least, what had covered her feet with her undersuit, had tapped him on the shins as he saw on the floor and dozed. He had woken up as men of action always do, with a sharp inhale and a slight seizing of his body, but he hadn't woken up in his bunk on the UNSC Savannah, and realized that whatever was happening had still been happening, and it wasn't a dream.

He raised an eyebrow at her in turn, she tilting her head at him in question. He shrugged.

Sleep always came to him easy. He had a few theories why, multiple doctors and medics suggesting reasons, but in time he had found it to be an asset. He had his own version of cryosleep and it had come in the form of a nap.

The shrug was an answer enough as Six let him have his sleep. She wouldn't be as welcoming of any rest. She had been trained to be on edge with the Covenant so close, but these were extraordinary conditions as she fought against her body to pound on that glass, pick up a shard when it broke, and then slit the necks of anything that hadn't been human around her.

She wouldn't get that chance today.

Hours, it'd been hours and the sky above had darkened through the skylights. That was when they came for them in the dark, Marines in blue armor stacking outside of their door, it opened. It was the same "N7" that had originally detained them. His armor had come back worse, and the tell-tale signs of plasma scorching had been on it. At least someone had been killing Covenant.

He came with a team, and those in the cells around them had cried for their heads in typical Covenant fashion, banging against the sturdy glass walls.

Again Six had nudged JD, and he had woken up, sprung to his feet as the doors to their cage slid open. Ryder had been more than observant that Six had curled her fists. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way, but we're moving you two."

"Why are we being held?" Six had asked instead with all the animosity she could give without having a gun raised at her.

Ryder had straightened his lips. The real answer was that it was for everyone's safety. "You two turned up in the middle of something big, and until we can find out what's going we're keeping you in detainment."

"Why can't we just tell you then what's going on?"

Her tone raised, and the same metal bindings came out from one of the Marines. Six's gaze had seen the gear, the equipment they brought. Regular cuffs had been there as well. Ryder had waved the Marine down from his precaution however. "Because we can't confirm who you are. Let's go. We can sort all of this out in a different place. Your hands for cuffs."

Across the rows of cells Usze had been woken up by the Elite in that cell that had taken watch as the rest slept. Things were getting interesting and the Spec Ops Elite wouldn't dare miss it.

Six had glared at the N7 dead on. Her eyes had been on fire, piercing blue, a rage behind her that was diluted into pure combat ability. Without that vent for it it boiled within her, especially when she had no idea what was going on. "I'll walk without them."

"_**Cuffs or bindings**_. And we'll have to carry you with the bindings."

JD had looked at her with tired eyes, and she talked back with her own. The ODST hadn't liked the idea anymore but slowly, reluctantly, he offered his own hands forward. So too did Six then.

The least they could as they were lead out was stare down any Covenant that looked at them as well, and Six had made sure to burn her piercing eyes into Usze's memory as the Elite looked at her be escorted out.

As they left the makeshift jail hall they were eventually rushed into an awaiting shuttle: there a dark man with a very obvious officer's cap was waiting, sitting across them, Ryder alone joining as the rest of the Marines peeled off and went back to their duties in a rush.

"So, you two are our VIPs today huh? Consider yourself lucky, you're going to be passengers on my ship's _**first shakedown run**_."

He was a man of rank, a pistol at his hip and age on his skin. JD had meekly raised his hands in a saluting motion, chest high, as best he could, informal at best, but the man had known what a superior was like. Six offered no such pleasantries.

As the door had sealed and closed the shuttle had taken off fast as the man looked them up and down.

"I'm Commander Anderson of the Systems Alliance, have you been treated well so far?"

Six had felt the vibrations of flight in her bones, her senses fine-tuned. It wasn't as fast as a Pelican, this shuttle. She looked around that space before nodding at him. "Yes, Commander. Who are you?"

Anderson had confusion pass by his face. "Commander Anderson, as I sai-"

"No." Six shook her head. "Systems Alliance. I've never heard of planetary government with that name, even amongst you Insurrectio-"

JD had been seated shoulder to shoulder with her, his left elbow poking her urgently. She looked over and he had mouthed a "no", his own head shaking back and forth subtly. He didn't think that these men had been insurrectionists. Didn't even think they had been their own planetary government.

"You're not prisoners you know." Their cuffs had vibrated the sound of metal as Anderson said so. He had went to his omni-tool and Ryder had immediately disagreed, before he could articulate the two cuffs had unlocked. Ryder had basically thrown himself onto Anderson's side of the aisle, making sure to immediately unlock his sidearm and place it in his lap. "Don't mind Commander Ryder. He's been in combat for the last few hours. He's jittery, right?"

The greying man gruffed. Sure.

Six had rubbed the skin that had been covered by the cuffs on her wrist, JD doing the same being nodding once at Anderson.

"You're welcome."

In his ear piece a voice could be overheard. "Joker here, Captain. Interrupting my beauty sleep? Come on we just got off the exercises and I'm beat by kicking Turian ass."

He sounded like his name, Six could hear.

Anderson held down his ear piece to talk. "Stow it Joker, we need the _**Normandy**_ prepped for dust off ASAP, destination Arcturus."

"Ah come on and I joined flight school to get off the station. But I got it Captain."

In that Kodiak there had been a simple viewport, displaying the space outside as they broke through to orbit, and both Six and JD drew bead on it.

They wouldn't know it then but as they found the wreck of the Savannah still drifting over space like so many UNSC ships during the course of their thirty year war, it'd be the last time they'd see it in space. Those blue and white Alliance cruisers had been near it, and indeed, any real chunk of debris both UNSC and Covenant and frantically scanning and collecting them. Their ships looked like nothing they'd ever seen.

Even the oldest Insurrectionists groups had access to at least the Pheonix-class ships that originally made their colonies.

This Systems Alliance, their ships weren't even close.

Anderson saw their awe, their confusion, their wonder all on their face. Fish out of water indeed. "As you can imagine, we have a lot of questions for you."

For the first time since they'd been captured, JD spoke. "You and us both."

"Hackett to Anderson and Ryder, I'll be joining you at Arcturus within the day once we let the Council get a look on the situation, but you need to leave system now before you're caught."

"We have an ETA on their arrival?"

"Five minutes. Hackett out."

* * *

Anderson and Ryder had been on their feet as the shuttle basically did everything short of crash into the hanger bay. "Once we're on this dreadnaught we need to move. So no lollygagging run with us!"

Dreadnaught? Both the ODST and Spartan thought. The ship that they had come to, as they saw out their view port, was hardly the size of Halcyon-class cruiser length wise. They had no time to ponder as they simply got onto their own feet as well and rolled with it, doors flying open as it revealed they had come in hot into a giant hanger bay: before them, a ship. Six could measure by visual alone, as per her training. 150 or so meters in length, curved, reminding her of cars almost on civilian streets, it had that stylistic approach with its sleek lines, thrusters apparently toward its back like wings. Black and white paint: on the wing that faced them designations: SR-1. _**NORMANDY.**_

"Come on let's go!" Ryder yelled and ushered them along. Multiple other crew had been filing into that ship called the Normandy via its ramp and ports, obviously in as much of a hurry as them. They joined them, cuffs and all.

In that overload of information, of being rushed and ushered ship to ship, JD and Six could hardly comprehend anything they were seeing save for the humans that were around them. They were humans, smelt, sounded, walked like them. No doubts about that, but everything was different, everything from doors to plating, sounds and systems, procedure and signs.

A voice to their left as they entered the head of the ship. "Captain on deck! With visitors too apparently, what the hell happened when I was asleep commander?"

A young man, prickly shave, and a mouth that seemed like it was used a lot.

"You'll know later Joker! Is Doctor Chakwas onboard?"

"Yes sir!"

"And Pressly?"

"Right here." An officer surely, sweaty, but so were most of the crew as they all got to their stations on the Normandy. Some them in uniforms, some of them without. Some of them had just straight out look like JD. What they saw at those stations was something far more elegant than a typical sloop or UNSC ship of this size. A little less utilitarian and a little more… It was what the future was supposed to look like, JD thought for some unidentifiable reason. It was small, not very wide. Only a few people could stand arm to arm outstretched. Consoles and displays were on the wall, and there was a blue aura to it all, moody and dark. When the two looked right as Anderson and "Pressly" spoke, giving them time to take it all in, they saw a map of the galaxy in a giant display in the center of what was the deck, surrounded by more consoles and crew stations.

It was a galaxy map like they had never seen, used to at least there being a highlighted section of the Orion Arm showing Covenant territory taken and where the UNSC stood. Every time they had ever looked at a galaxy map the UNSC territory had gotten smaller and smaller.

"Okay, lock in and we gotta go. Activate the stealth core out of the gate." He turned over, remembering Six and JD. "Ryder! Have these two confined to med bay for HAZMAT and a health evaluation."

"Aye. You two!" He pointed to two of the soldiers on deck with rifle. "With me come on!"

As the two guests had been led away by Ryder Anderson had rushed over to joker. Pajamas on, cap riding his head. "Sorry Joker."

"Ah it's fine I'm just thinking this just a dream and I'll wake up any second."

"Last one who could make it is on board! We'll have everyone take a shuttle to Arcturus later!" Pressly had yelled from the dock, it closing shut with a hiss.

_"This is Killimanjaro control. Normandy you are cleared for dust off."_

"This is your captain speaking, everyone hold on to your butts." Joker had been more than casual, but perhaps maybe it was because he had entirely missed the First Contact situation. "I think this is a good situation for a shakedown run, don't you think sir? What was the original shakedown run for anyway?"

"Classified Joker, let's go."

And go they did as the entire Normandy came alive and was punted forward.

* * *

It seemed like every ship they were going to be on for their foreseeable future was going to throw them around, as was why JD had fallen down the stairs to a lower deck. Six's breath hitched when it happened. She was a Lone Wolf. That's what many a commander, ONI assessor, and asset that had to work with her had called her. People kept her slow, and so she became a wolf who dressed like a man. That was the entire concept behind the Spartans anyway: the next step in human evolution as those who knew Spartan Program would say. Six had seen the progenitor of the Spartan Program after so many years of hearing about it from Lieutenant Commander Ambrose.

She met that progenitor, weeks ago when Reach had invaded at the ONI Sword Base.

Doctor Catherine Halsey.

She knew more than most about the Spartans, about herself and the circumstances of the Program. Lieutenant Commander Ambrose had confided some of this information in her when she was deployed out of training alone. She only learned more as she lived on, far past her planned expiration date of 2545 at 51 Pegasi.

Fate had a different plan for her, and whatever its plans, for those choice moments she thought of fate and destiny such as now, JD was the only ally she truly had right then and there. Whether or not she was a Lone Wolf truly, the ODST and the Spartan were now bound by shared circumstance.

JD probably felt the same in some way as he hit the bottom of the stairs and was sympathetically helped up by an older woman with silken white hair, crows feet along her eyes.

"Oh dear. Are you alright?" Classic English accent from the British Isles. "Usually when I treat wounded it's not from falling down the stairs."

The ship screamed around them, but apparently that was normal, JD being raised to his feet.

"Awfully green, are you?" She had a grey and white outfit that definitely spoke to a doctor's uniform: SR1 in a patch on her arms. She remarked on his own slacks: all green and drab.

As a Marine should be, he thought to himself.

Ryder had been more prompt as he opened up the med bay. "Ma'am. Captain says to give these two a shake down while this ship is doing its own."

"Circumstances other than the shakes?" The good doctor had brushed JD's shoulders as Six and him were led in. Only then did she notice the Marines with them ready.

"Consider them a newly discovered species."

The doctor did a double take, as if she had missed a third eye on JD or Six. "Oh."

* * *

An ensign on the Kilimanjaro's bridge tried to yell but the ship's alarms blared as it always did when a non-Alliance IFF popped up. Hackett was able to hear however as he sat in his own captain's chair, seeing the Normandy depart.

"We've got Asari, Turian, and Salarian IFF signatures coming through the Mass Relay! They'll be dropping in in two minutes, five seconds!"

Hackett had opened up comms to the Normandy. "Normandy we've got the Council coming through now! Hit that relay or else we'll be caught with our VIPs."

Hackett's message had punched through right into Joker and Anderson's ear.

"Can we make it Joker?" Anderson pressed, white knuckled on the pilot's seat.

No handles, no steering wheel or even a pull lever. Just pure touch screen madness, and Joker's fingers were flying instead. "First time these engines have been used at this speed. But hell, we will."

"Message coming through on the relay!" An ensign blurted on both ships in some way.

_"This is Asari Ship Open Arms we are entering the system imminently. Be advised."_

Joker laughed, turning over to Anderson. "Is this gonna be a thing? Running from the Council?"

_ **"Joker."** _

"Sir can they make it?" Hackett's XO asked as they tracked the Normandy's distance to the Relay. Any rational person would say they wouldn't, even as the Normandy flew like a shooting star, far faster than any fighter in Alliance inventory right now.

The admiral could only smirk. He'd seen the specification data for it. "Let's hope so." He had gone to answer the call from the Council ships. "This is Admiral Steven Hackett to inbound Council ships, advise that you slow down your approach if you can, be aware that there are spatial anomalies in the area that have effected one of our ships."

Distantly Shaw heard that over comms. It was a half-truth.

"Copy that Admiral Hackett."

"Relay is in range. Commencing transmission sequence. Safeties off and activating the stealth drive. Engineering I need bypass on the thermal conduit locks, we're breaking in our thrusters right here right now."

_"Copy all."_

"Locks disengaged. Transfer complete. Pressly we locked in!?" Joker yelled back, business in his voice instead of smack.

_"Arcturus Prime Relay set!"_

Out in the distance through the side windows of the cockpit the giant, fork like, energy spewing constructs were seen and rapidly getting closer. The orange screens of the consoles had gone alight in readings as the Relay reached out and began to tether to the Normandy, but still not close enough.

The Relay had started to flicker, sparks of energy emanating from its core. A telltale sign that something else had been using it.

While everyone else had been grimacing, jaws clenched and at pucker factor 11, Joker had kept a defiant smirk as he looked over at the extra-pilot seat to his right and behind. "Oh I wish Kaiden and his biotic butt were here to see this."

Every Alliance ensign and officer in space who had to watch the Normandy make that sprint held their breath, a secret of humanity at stake as their worlds stood still, even with the new aliens below them an enigma far greater than even the Council that had been coming. At least the Council and its member species were cordial, had a procedure for this and humanity had benefit for.

Blue light had suddenly beamed in wherever it could as the ship shifted hard and to the right, sending the crew inside askew. A drift by any other name as the Normandy aligned with the aim of the Relay. Joker slapped through the hard-light controls as he hit the button to jump.

Moments later ships from a different alien union had come, none the wiser.

_"This is Open Hand to Alliance Ships, good to see you here, now if you could please designat- By the spirits?! What is going on over there?!"_

Shaw had taken conciliation that even the great, aloof Asari, the courageous Turians, and the far more intelligent and measured Salarians had the same reactions he did to the goat rodeo he had first come upon.

* * *

"What just happened?" Six knew it in her bones as the vibrations she felt in her feet shook and then settled like a bell ceasing its vibrations. She knew the feeling well. "We're in FTL."

Ryder was surprised as he checked his omni-tool. The Normandy was well underway and he couldn't tell. He felt more at home with dirt beneath his feet, but he was no slouch with sensitivity and control of his senses. "You felt that?'

That same orange, arm bound tool had been used by the Doctor Chakwas as it was JD's turn to be half naked, scanned from head to toe, on the MRI machine's bed and sitting as if it was a checkup. "First contact, Commander Ryder? He seems to be perfectly human. Twenty five or twenty six perhaps? Healthy, definitely. Keeps up his PT and vitamins."

She had given a light knuckled tap to JD's stomach, core seizing up and showing abs. JD could only give a smile for a short moment, nodding. This doctor had been amiable and, if he played his cards right, he might've ended up as the equivalent for the ODSTs. That thought had ended his smile. For when he thought of his future, he thought of where he was now, and just for one second, he realized that he would never get there. Not because of a Jackal putting a Needle Rifle round through his head or being caught in a ship when a plasma torpedo evaporated it, but because he was _**here**_.

"I'm a Combat Medic."

Six was sitting in Chakwas' chair at her desk as she attended to JD, Ryder and the Marines standing by the door. Ryder had caught her, eye to eye, when she scanned the room, analyzing her situation. He had shook his head at her, and she had sniffled displeased and kept that face on. That is until he spoke. In the short time, literal hours and a handful of sentences exchanged, she had known that he spoke only when important.

Chakwas nodded, smiling at him. "Oh are you?'

He nodded in turn.

"I keep… more people alive that way."

The doctor chuckled softly, handing him his shirt back to put on as she doubled checked her readings. "Good man. And definitely a man. 100% human."

"Anything else Doctor?" Ryder crossed his arms, looking at JD. He didn't consider him a threat, but he was ordered to take care of both.

She had taken her hand and ghosted to the back of his cranium. "Base of his skull. There's some electronics. Most likely a chip similar to the L implants with the biotics. Less activity however. I think it's more for identification, is it?" JD straightened his mouth, tightened his teeth. He wouldn't say and they both knew that. "Fair enough."

"You. Your up." Ryder pointed to Six, directing her to the table as JD stepped down and the two locked eyes again.

Six and JD spoke the language of eyes and face. Six spoke it better however, JD could tell. There were emotions on her face that she did not hide at all, writ in eyebrows, scowls, squints and the curl of her mouth.

He looked at her face to communicate to her, befitting both of them as quiet types, and only know did he look at her face to see her. He finally, subconsciously, put details to her in the back of his head. She was ethnically Arab, she was the same age as him, and she had not been used to having her helmet off. Her helmet had become her face.

She was a Spartan, and he realized he would come to learn more about them then he had any right to now as she reluctantly traded spaces with him.

"Do I need to take this off of you in order to get a subdermal scan of you dear?" Chakwas asked carefully. They were prisoners of some sort she realized, but they had a long day. She'd seen too many soldiers who had been through such and required delicate handling.

She shook her head. "I don't have much of a choice if you do, do I?"

"My last name is an anagram of hacksaw, I'll have you know, but trust me, I mean no harm." Six imagined that this is what regular medics and doctors in the UNSC were like. She never knew. She either was her own medic or dealt with those specifically for Spartans. They weren't kind or as amiable as this one as far as she could tell. "Your name, and his? Do you mind telling me?"

JD had grimaced in the seat he now sat in. "I don't think we're at liberty to say…" he said softly again.

Six was grateful that he did say so. She had no name to say that hadn't been drenched in military lies, that wasn't followed by a number or preceded by a rank. No one had said her first name in more than a decade, and she was lucky she had remembered what her real name was before she was inducted into the Spartan-III Program. With this, until now, she had almost forgotten her name.

"I see."

So Chakwas started, and with one pass of her omni-tool, she now knew why, assuming that anyone else who handled her before knew, she was basically alien.

Chakwas eyes went wide, sharing it with Ryder. Once, long ago, on one of her first missions, she was the lone survivor of an attack by the Covenant that would've killed her, even with the armor. The only reason she survived was one of the reasons why Chakwas couldn't believe what she saw on her omni-tool. She had stood in a pool of red blood and broken bodies, and she did not see it fair that those Marines died while she remained. She was ashamed of what had been done to her for the same reason that Chakwas uttered aloud.

_ **"You're more than human."** _


	3. 0-3:  The Future They Had

Amul Shastri had been the Prime Minister of humanity's representative body among the stars: The Systems Alliance. Created by Earth's most able nations, they represented humanity as a whole amongst the stars and, most importantly, with the Citadel. He was a former pilot in the Systems Alliance military, leading a fighter squadron during the Skyllian Blitz. War Heroes had a way to sway public opinion polls in order to be appointed into positions of power, but it hadn't been unwarranted. Having a tough man be the head of government was what the Galaxy needed more than ever, and the reports that had been filed to his desk that day had just continued to stack up. The reports had went like this:

First, a presumably space faring coalition or union of Aliens suddenly appeared over the Human Colony of Altis, not with ships per se, but the remains of such. Losing flight capabilities en masse, they had made planetfall while also somehow being the cause of an Alliance cruiser's loss of their Mass Effect field. Because of that not only was the Altis Colony to be evacuated and vacated (the colonists already on station at Arcturus), but conserved hostilities were had throughout the planet fall site and the debris field on Altis.

Second, as a follow up to the first report, this was also a First Contact situation. A First Contact Situation which none of the new aliens had any intention to also understanding.

Third, there were eight unknown species that were acting in concert as such.

Fourth, they spoke Human naturally and recognized the human race.

Fifth, two humans, anomalous, had showed up during that planetfall and were unable to be identified.

And, lastly, just freshly delivered to his desk, one of those humans was, in laymen's terms-

"_**She's superhuman?**_" Shastri asked as he had combed through her record.

His advisor nodded, hands behind his back. "First reports from the Normandy en-route via their ship's doctor has stated that she's been very much subject to biological engineering, and, from her hypothesis, from an early age."

An MRI scan of the woman's body was had. That is, the MRI scan had been completely scattered and unusable. As if her body itself wasn't playing ball with the MRI machine on the Normandy.

"Some of the things I'm seeing here, that's in violation of Sudam-Wolcott, isn't it?" The rather recent act outlawing genetic therapy in express interest of adding new abilities had been rather prudent, one of the many laws adopted by the Systems Alliance in order to please the Council.

The advisor nodded, his goatee being stroked anxiously. "It might be. We're still digesting this information, but however it is it very much toes the line and is very dangerous… if not outright impossible. No Alliance doctor would be practicing such things."

Shastri placed the report down as he saw some of said details, imagining what it would be like if he had what those scans had implicated. Maybe he would've been a GI instead of a pilot. He certainly would've been able to punch above his weight… Hell, punch a hole through a god damn battalion.

"These upgrades," he started, hands rubbing his eyes for a moment as he tried to take everything that had transpired those last six hours in. That morning he had just gotten off the horn from the Citadel with Ambassador Udina. Another damnable update of some effort he thought would improve their chances on seat status on the Council. Given recent events he was sure he would have to call the incessant politician again. Not that he didn't enjoy his insight or efforts, but Shastri was reminded that he had once been a soldier who was supposed to detest politicians. "They are nigh impossible to pull of correct? I don't even think any of our Biotic programs or gene therapy clinics are able to change the composition of _**human bone**_."

The advisor nodded, as much at a loss as the Prime Minister. "Sir we're looking into extra-governmental organizations and criminal organizations: the Blue Suns, The Red Line Institute, Cerberus, and even Salarian and Asari research groups, however we don't have anything like this on record."

"Have they been accused of any crimes yet? Are they responsible for bringing this situation on Altis?"

"Unknown sir, however they were fighting them. Not in murder, but rather in a military engagement. They were predisposed to fighting when we found them, and they seemed like they were in their right to kill any alien they came across."

"Any contact with Citadel Species?"

"No sir." That was another big question. How would they react to any other alien species?

In the distance, towards the turning Mass Relay of Arcturus, a ship had blipped through, unbeknownst to any in system. The stealth systems of the Normandy worked both ways.

"They're inbound, correct?"

"Yes sir."

"Our diplomatic section is clear correct? Volus cleared out yesterday?"

The Advisor nodded, pulling up his data pad. "Next person will be Nihlus in two weeks before he transfers to Earth to begin Spectre evaluations along with the _**Eden Prime**_ situation."

"Alright, set them up there and convert a conference room for questioning. Get Intelligence Command alerted and have them bring over one of their questioners."

"Yes, Mister Prime Minister."

The Advisor had left, bowing out silently. Hardly a moment passed when the doors to his office sealed and he had groaned, slouching back in his chair. In the years he'd been Prime Minister he thought, at some point, this would all get easier. It wasn't so as he had walked to the side of his office to the table that played host to his vodka and glasses. A quick sip was all he needed to calm his mind. The only solace he could take was that the Council would be too busy dealing with the aliens on Altis than to be concerned with the humans that had been extracted and currently inbound. That and, for the most part, this would remain classified.

* * *

JD had pressed his arms forward, just short of shoving them to Ryder and Anderson's chest. He was a fair man, believed in bearing the burden his fellow servicemen had weathered. It was only right. That was the price of his survival this long in the War. That extended even to the Spartans.

The first scans of her had been the reason she was binded, shackled, cuffed and restricted. Not free of her own movement save the movement of her torso and head.

JD was not given the same treatment, and he thought it wrong. Six had remained silent ever since Doctor Chakwas had did her scans and delivered the news to the command staff. More troops had been around them then, even one without a gun.

"Lieutenant Alenko," Anderson had started, looking at JD's face and realizing that it was either bind him the same as the woman, or he would force them to. "Tie up our guest here. Let us respect his solidarity.

Six had been surprised, if not disappointed. There was no reason for JD to be tied up, it gave them less options if push came to shove and she wouldn't have that. She wouldn't let anyone drag themselves down to her level. She opened her mouth to say but JD had already given him a glare at her.

'Don't even think about it.' He had read in his eyes as the bracers were clamped onto him by Lieutenant Alenko. Alenko had a shapely, handsome face, but it was that of a man who'd been through rough times. Even as he had done the deed he had given JD a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. Anyone could respect what he was doing.

"This is to keep all of us safe, don't worry about it." He had given a glance to Six. She flared her nostrils for a second, obviously not agreeing.

The Normandy had come into one of the hanger bays of Arcturus Station, its deployment ramp put down and extended as a procession of Marine Gaurds outside had lined the way out and into the station. Ready to transfer them had been Commander Anderson and Commander Ryder. A giant station it had been, of steel and stainless metals that made it glow in the darkness of space. It was bigger than some of the MAC Defense Platforms, but this station was meant for a different purpose.

For what purpose Six couldn't figure, not when she felt her entire body seize up, frozen. In the corners of her vision she saw a blue aura surround her. She went to yell but even her mouth could not move.

"Alright, she's not that heavy." Alenko had said with abrasiveness in his voice, cool and calm taking him over as JD turned over and saw what he had been doing turn onto him. A distortion of reality itself seemed to manifest in his hand and then, around him as he felt himself being lifted.

It had been the same kind of blue "flame" he witnessed during the firefight. It saved him from a Brute when he ran out of ammo. For the few seconds as it happened to them, JD and Six had allowed themselves to think that magic was real. Despite their stasis and manhandling, having been lifted up, their eyes still moved within their sockets, and they both found each other's.

That Ryder had noticed as the ramp finished lowering. "Not how you thought your last tour with the Alliance was going to go, huh?" Anderson had patted his back, drawing his attention away from the controlled chaos in that hanger all meant for them.

"Who says I'm retiring David?"

"You have your wife to attend to. I know how it is sometimes."

"Hmph."

A man with a goatee in civilian clothing had been at the bottom of the ramp, waving at the two commanders and their guests. Kaiden had followed the two as they went down and met the man, Marines at the ready, helmets on, rifles armed.

"Commander Anderson, Commander Ryder?"

"Yes," The civilian man had given Anderson and once up and down, followed by JD and Six, frozen and very much not wanting to be so. "I'm Advisor Dawes, special assistant to Prime Minister Shastri."

"Didn't think I'd need to see you again Dawes." Ryder ground out, hands at his hips and obviously not interested in hearing from him.

It was understandable. Ryder's wife was dying. Not a quick death, not an easy one. A long death. A disorder that ate away at her very body and used her body's defenses to break her down. A painful death that came by inches, and she was still being dragged there. Ryder wouldn't have it. No. He'd fight teeth and nail, bone and blood, for her to live. Lawful or not he had tried to find a way to save her life, and when the line was crossed, Dawes was one of the people to stern him on his methods.

The discussion didn't go well.

"Don't give me this Ryder. We have bigger things to deal with than you your AI talk." Dawes had said, leading the group through the procession of Marines toward an open door. "Orders are to deposit them in the VIP section. It's been just cleared and ready for them. Anderson you have a briefing with Prime Minister Shastri on the situation instead of Admiral Hackett."

"You have them Lieutenant Alenko? Commander Ryder?" Alenko hadn't seem that weary just lifting these two, he shaking his head. Ryder had only answered affirmatively. "Very well, see you in a bit."

Kaiden Alenko was a biotic, that was a fact that Six and JD had been made abundantly clear of as they were held like statues. However the amount of focus that was needed to channel such energy. His senses could still pick up what had been on the fringes. That comment about Ryder's wife however, he couldn't miss it, stewing it over in his head.

He knew the name Ryder, albeit from a different person than the commander before him.

He was a friendly guy, tried to be anyway, and so as he and that Ryder walked down the halls with two frozen people, Marines ghosting them, he had spoken to a Commander that was not his own.

"I'm sorry about your wife, Ellen, Commander Ryder." He said, a little strained, given his duties at the moment.

It was odd small talk during their walk down those halls, one Six and JD didn't catch as they were still petrified, literally and mentally.

Ryder hadn't turned his head as he led the way.

"Did you know her?"

Alenko had given out a breath fondly. "She helped install my L2 Implant, and I've talked to her regarding the side effects of it since. I owe her a lot as a _**biotic**_." Alenko's final word had been something Six had been able to pick up: "Biotic". Is that the reason why he had been able to do what he was doing to them? Even the Covenant hadn't anything or anyone able to do this with their anti-grav tech. "If there's anything I can do, please tell me. I'd like to help."

"You can help by not talking about it, lieutenant."

It'd been the longest five minutes in the Spartan and ODST's lives, but eventually both of them had been entered into a room, their bindings and cuffs lost, but their forms still frozen. When they heard the door close behind them they had then dropped to the floor in their presumed new cell, turning to the door to find it locked.

It wasn't a cell they were dropped in. Far from it.

After a moment of disorientation, they had scanned the room they were dropped in and were presented with something neither of them had been in for years without it either being destroyed or broken into: an apartment.

* * *

A woman lay on the shores of a frozen lake. Her skin was pale, but pleasantly so, she'd never been able to weather a tan, but her skin was thick anyway. It was reddened both by the freckles on her face, and the body's reaction to the cold. Frosty breaths came from her mouth, green eyes the only real vibrant color on her form as the rest had been concealed by snow white ghillie and actual snow. Those green eyes stared right into an old model scope from a hunting rifle. Not of mass effect field propulsion or thermal coils, but rather of metal and steel and wood. It was a firearm from Earth's past, but it never fell out of usage for those who walked the last of Earth's frontiers, where development had just stopped and nature remained miraculously.

That frontier, specifically, as she was buried in snow and cold, laid on her stomach perched on her view point, was the Alaskan wildlands.

She wasn't trained a sniper. No. Special forces yes, but more a regular operator, a rifleman with a pedigree, but a rifleman all the same. In that leave she had been granted for the last month she had been tempted to take a sniper rifle and try it out, and she had started at a very archaic form of it. 'You never knew when you would have to pick up a sniper.' She reasoned.

The weather, the snow, she didn't mind. She was an N7 for a reason and went through every number behind that with flying colors.

That's why her educated guess was right.

With her own eyes she saw a buck walk into view on the other side of the lake. The lake had been frozen solid, as were most of the streams and tributaries, save for that one corner of the shore that had been punched in through the glassy ice from a fallen tree. Not many animals had been in the area to take advantage of it, however she had known that one might've.

14-and-a-half-point buck.

She'd been tracking this buck for a few days, a refresher on her tracker skills from the Academy. Usually command had already identified the target and all she needed to do was get to it. A refresher was good however.

It had walked to those snowy shores with grace, scanning the area, big black eyes seeing everything but the woman. She hadn't known if it was her only streak of xenophilia, but she had appreciated the looks of Earth animals more than those on alien worlds. Even on Shanxi or Terra Nova.

It was a shame though, she thought, putting her cheek to the wooden stock and dipping her head down, putting snow in her mouth to hide her breath.

The buck had walked forwards to the pristine waters, dipping its head down, one lick of water was all it had taken before it raised up as if it was alerted. By corollary she had been too. She understood why though. Two other deer had come into view from the snowy trees, going to the shoreline and sipping. A doe, and a younger buck.

At some point in Earth's past more than three quarters of the animal species had toed the line into extinction, rampant industry and ecological destruction making that so. Humanity knew better now as they looked outward physically, but inward spiritually. Mother Earth could be outgrown, but always be their home.

It wasn't a matter of preservation that made her be asked that question of why she hadn't put a bullet through a buck that was presenting her a perfect target silhouette.

She knew why she stayed her shot as the animals sipped at available water.

She was fast on the shot, but not on the trigger. Time was something that could be given in every single situation if she was in the lead. The ability to Control, the ability to Destroy, the ability to find something in between. These were all choices she had understood to be cardinal in her leadership, and only time could give her the ability to make the best choices among them all, in every situation. She waited and bided her time.

This time it didn't take long, as opposed to when during the Blitz she had waited an entire night for a Batarian outpost to become a meeting point between Batarian pirate leaders. There was a time and place for everything, especially her actions.

Suddenly the three elk had went to the very edge of the shores very suddenly, the male elk, damn near size of half a Mako, taking position in front of them very protectively. The wind had blocked what noise she could hear down the way, but she got her answer as four-legged canine walked forward, teeth barred. Grey fur, fangs.

A lone wolf.

The hunter immediately adjusted his aim, aiming at the wolf, peering through her scope.

Her finger had touched the trigger of her old hunting rifle but settled herself. Even now she wouldn't take a shot before she saw, not a target, but what was happening.

The wolf was shaking, which was odd for the animal here. She zoomed in her optic and she saw its ribs to the bone.

Hunting hadn't gone well for this wolf apparently, and it was starving to the bone. She realized just then that she hadn't been the only one using that watering hole as bait.

The wolf had, despite its hunger, had used its desperation to step far more forward than any wolf would've against a big buck like the one it squared off against. The hunger was in service to another hunger: that of survival and tenacity. The larger elk had opened its mouth and air bellowing defensively as the Wolf growled and assumed pouncing position, unaware of another predator among them: a high-powered rifle reminding her that this was the reason she was on top of the food chain here.

Shoot the buck, she would've done the wolf a favor.

Shoot the buck and the doe, hopefully the wolf would've gone after the doe and she could've recovered the buck.

Shoot all three because leaving a young deer to itself and a wolf, in the middle of this winter, and she would've kept that poor thing in suffering.

Shoot the wolf, and it would get that family out of harm's way. Put the wolf out of its suffering, even if it had a chance now, or later.

Do nothing, and nature would play its course.

She knew what to do.

The Butcher of Torfan had always made a decision, and, more than that, she committed to it. Owned it.

She took in cold air into her lungs and held as she made her shot.

* * *

She forgot to wear hearing protection, the report of these old 20th century firearms had been a great deal louder than the mass effect-based weapons of now. There was power in sound however as she approached her target, rifle in hand, bolt already cycled and .458 cartridge in her pocket. The cost of these old, artisan bullets had been a little too high for her to even afford to use that much. Only two mags had been with her, and this was her first bullet used.

A smirk had been beneath her fabric mouth cover, the white beanie on her head taken off and her fiery red hair let flow free in the Alaskan breeze. Her small nose had erupted with more frosty breath as she pulled her mouth cover down, her teeth and tongue alight with the cold nip.

For how expensive these rounds were, they certainly did the job as she stood before her deed and felt bad.

The small tree near the animals that she had hit had erupted in shrapnel and branches, bark marring pristine snow.

Yeah, she nodded to herself. The shot had scared both groups off. She could live with that.

It wasn't up to her to decide the course of nature, but she was a part of it nonetheless.

It might've not given her a trophy for her new quarters on Commander Anderson's ship, or hell, a lunch, but there were better things to waste bullets on than bucks and wolves.

Thunder. Not from her.

She snapped her head to the north, toward Mount Chamberlin. Distantly, the cry of a beast up in the mountains. A bear brought out of hibernation? Perhaps, she thought. It was certainly worth going after, and she had the tags for bear hunting. As far as leaves go, this was one of her better vacations.

She looked to the stars, towards the relays, towards Arcturus Station. She was thankful that down here on Earth on her own frontier, alone and in solitude, she was left away from the politics, the wars, the conflicts that had given her enough medals eventually forget what each one meant. It was comforting to be on her own for once, and, as her assignment from Anderson came in to her before she had embarked on her hunting trip, more peace and a less complicated life was ahead of her.

With one grateful breath of fresh air, she had covered herself in white again, and took off.

* * *

The first time they were separated in the last twelve hours has been for a guessable reason. Questioning. Even with uniforms out of line Six and JD knew what spooks looked like. Six had known them all her life, and their identification lied behind their smiles. All fake and formality. She was an ONI Asset for most of her Spartan Career.

She'd been under direct command of Colonel Ackerson at one point, so she knew ONI or those who would be their agents as well as any.

She'd been the first to private go and, for her troubles, she'd at least gone without bindings, only cuffs.

Before she had left however JD had strained his voice as Marines kept him down sitting in their new "quarters".

"What's your name?"

Six wasn't her name. He wanted to set it straight before he had gotten it in his head that she was only "Six". She hesitated with an answer in her head, and she didn't have the time before she was led out.

When she returned two hours later she couldn't give it still as JD was taken and gone through the same process. Walking those halls, silver and blue, it was obvious that this space station hadn't been a black site. There was too much traffic outside the windows, too many plain clothes that he had passed on the way to wherever he was being led and they didn't pay any heed to him. It reminded him of the space elevator stations where civilians had access and commerce. In the plain English the room he was being led into was a conference room, the green holographic interface on the door activating and then opening it. He didn't fuss, didn't shuffle, didn't fight against those that led him here. Cooperation was his aim, and he did try his best. The same Marine had escorted him. Alenko, he remembered. He had carefully taken off his cuffs before pointing down to JD's boots.

"You've seen some action man."

Before he could answer, verbally or otherwise, JD noticed three men at the end of the table. Ryder was one of them. Two men in some sort of suits, formal, black officer caps on their head. No pen or paper, no physical recording device, but he doubted they needed one. The room was probably bugged, chairs and wooden table in the middle as he felt rug beneath his feet.

Ryder was centered in the middle of the men, still in armor, the two men in black patiently waiting. One opened up his arm. "J. J. Durante," JD paused, hearing his name uttered by these men. "Please take a seat."

He couldn't give Alenko a response, but he understood. "Good luck."

To that he could at least raise both his eyebrows and smile farcically.

When he sat down he realized that these hadn't been chairs of the military. No, these chairs were nice and soft, supported civilian backs for the business life, not his type. It was warm however. Six had kept it ready for him.

He ran his hands through unkept hair. He had a full head of hair, unlike his father, fluffy and liable to move on its own at the right walking speed or wind shear. Couldn't grow a beard worth a damn however.

"As you must understand, for you and us, the last twelve hours, and undoubtedly the next twelve hours to come, will be full of confusion and questions both on our part and yours." One of the men in black said. He had a cleft on his lip, seen some fighting. The other had aviator sun glasses, hiding most of his eyes. Cleft Lip went on, offering the chair on the other side of the conference table to J. J. Durante. "So we're gonna ask you some questions." It wasn't a large distance, for the room was small, but it kept the two sides separated as JD looked around further. The walls were glass, but one had been mirrored. It was asymmetrical in a room that had been symmetrical, unkind lights above beaming down on him. It wasn't an interrogation room, just, apparently, some cut rate conference room for anyone staying there.

They really weren't prisoners. Nor were they free. Just something in between.

"Don't I get answers then?" The ODST asked.

Sunglasses had smiled. "See it took this one only a minute to talk."

_'Then how long did Six take?'_

Cleft-Lip had looked at Ryder, whom shrugged, before continuing. "We'll answer your questions in due time Mister Durante," JD Cringed. It'd been a long time since anyone had called him 'Mister'. Private had fit better to him at this point. "However, I think we're entitled to ask questions first given the circumstances which you were picked up."

Sunglasses reached out with his hand for a moment. "Oh don't worry, you're not a prisoner, or being charged. You're, well, in legal terms I guess a person of interest… even if no crime has been… uh, committed."

Ryder had still been staring a hole through him, arms crossed. He had been perturbed. Six's doing probably, JD imagined. She had no reason to play ball with him, though that had raised a question. He was a soldier clearly, a fighter… but an interrogator?

"So if we could start, what is your full name?"

He could play this game. His father, while also bald, was also a _**cop**_.

_**"Jon-James Durante."**_ The three men had seemed pleased he was talking at all, and his tone was neutral, an equivalent of a shrug. Yet then and there JD had told them how to speak while not saying anything at all. Their enthusiasm had went down as his mount continued to move, his quiet voice replaying information that could've just as easily been found on his dog tags. _**"11282-31220."**_

Name and serial number. That was all they would get.

"Oh come now. We don't have to-"

_"Jon-James Durante. 11282-31220."_

"Well at least he's confirming his name at least."

_"Jon-James Durante. 11282-31220."_

"It's also confirming he's got survival training. Regular ex-grunts usually don't recite this." Ryder raiser a finger. JD shrugged, admittedly. It was a nice catch. He was special forces. Maybe not the most extreme, but being called a shock trooper was more than just a hooah factor.

_"Jon-James Durante. 11282-31220."_

His father brought in a deserter once who had somehow made it back to Luna, going on to Earth. He had killed a man on the way, accidentally, but when his father was on the case they didn't know that. When the body was dug up underneath a crate of SPUNKrs, he pressed the questioning. The deserter responded as he did now, and he saw the irony.

"You a prisoner of war, son?" Ryder was annoyed.

_"Jon-James Durante. 11282-31220."_

"Are we the enemy?"

JD let them have something, shaking his head no. Still he went on.

_"Jon-James Durante. 11282-31220."_

They three men had gone on for a while, taunting, trying new questions, talking amongst themselves openly. Spoke about dinner, cabinet stylings, their guns. Wasn't anything JD wanted to hear. So it went on for a while.

Part of N7 training had wandered into this sort of situation however, as odd as that was. At a certain point N7s were expected to answer calls that brought them out of combat, but into the extra-ordinary. Situations where word and trust became more valuable than a gun and aim. In laymen's terms, he was trained to talk. Even when he didn't enjoy that aspect of it, he kept it in his back pocket.

It meant that he recognized every time that JD spoke his name and serial number, it meant that he was waiting. The rules of combat could carry over to the rules of conversation.

"What do you want to know?" Was Ryder's interrupt to action.

JD stopped in the middle of his recitement, a smile of his own. "Systems Alliance. You keep saying that name but… I've never heard of it before. I mean, you operate your own navy it seems, your own intelligence service, but I've…"

The two men in black looked at each other as JD went on. He wasn't good at words, but the question was asked. "If you let us know what the "UNSC" is, we will let you know. That okay? Give and take?"

"You don't know what the UNSC is?" His talk was slowing. He didn't believe he was running out of breath. Then again he hadn't need to talk so much ever since he had enlisted. His guns and his superiors talked for him.

"Yes. Simply. Do you mind elaborating? Is it a colony government? A mercenary group? The United Nations Security Council has been disbanded since the early for centuries."

"What?" JD questioned their sanity. "The UNSC, the command and military agency for Unified Earth Gov?"

Sunglasses raised an eyebrow. "United Earth Gov? What's that? We haven't heard of that political faction on Earth."

Had things changed while he was in the outer colonies? He hadn't been entirely invested in the politics of Earth and the Inner Colonies given a war was going on, but it was unlikely there had been a coup or some sort of political revolution that came without him knowing. "It's Earth's main representative body, for Earth and all her colonies."

"Well that's simply not right. The System Alliance has assumed that responsibility while the governments on Earth maintain their own sovereignty and political affiliation."

Were these guys the aliens? JD thought as if they were crazy. They were speaking of Earth. The homeworld. If they knew of Earth of course they knew of the UNSC, of the Covenant, of the War and of everything.

"When was the last time you were on Earth, son?" Sunglasses asked, carefully, prodding.

"I haven't back to Earth-… I haven't been home, to Luna, since '47."

"2147?" Cleft-Lip almost laughed.

His hearing was sharp. Sharp enough to catch an actively camo'd Elite in the foliage. Sharp enough to hear a man tell him the last '47 was four centuries ago. _**"What."**_

Sunglasses straightened his mouth. "We've been meaning to ask you that. We found some dog tags in that transport aircraft you occupied and, well, some of the dates put the birthdate of whoever those tags belonged to into the 2520s and the 2510s."

JD's eyes sunk in, staring holes into all across from him. They'd taken even his watch from him, but on his watch had been the date on its digital interface. It was August 14, 2552. It had to be, for his sanity, for anything to make sense.

"What is today's date. Earth Standard Time?"

"Hm? On Earth? _**It's November 13**__**th**__**. 2183**_."

As Six knew liars, JD knew when a lie had been told. He spent his childhood with his father in the station at Cirsium City, been through a thousand revolutions and revelations in regards to criminal cases via his detective father. So he knew a revelation when he felt it course through his bones and blood, straight to the very front of his brain and caused a great explosion of thought. What these men in black said, wasn't a lie.

They said it too fast. Too concretely. Rolled off a date and a year like nothing. Didn't take them off guard, an answer delivered as if they were stating their name and the weather.

He stood up, palms on the desk, Ryder responding like wise. "I need to get back to the quarters. Talk to Six about this."

"And why should we do that?" Ryder had been stern and ready to kick his ass but it hadn't been anything he hadn't dealt before from ODST platoon leaders who had kicked the bucket five minutes after the drop, leaving him alive for the following month-long campaign.

"We'll talk. I promise. We'll start talking."

"Or you could just be getting a fantastical story straight with her."

"Ten minutes commander. Ten minutes and we'll give you what you need."

He was already out of his seat and Ryder had already regretted not chaining them to the table. This wasn't a proper interrogation room though. It was a shame they weren't officially being interrogated, so he couldn't exactly place that same pressure.

It was allowed.

* * *

At some point, between JD having left for thirty minutes and him returning, Six had been provided sweat pants and a hoodie to hide her figure. It made JD do a double take as he returned, seeing her adorned with the emblem of the Systems Alliance. Obviously, someone had gone to the Gift Shop for her decency.

She had raised her eyebrow. He was back fast compared to her.

"Do you know the current date that these people are using, Six?" She had narrowed her eyes at him, head tilted. No, she didn't know. She didn't say a word as they sat there and tried to ask questions for two hours. She didn't give them the time of day.

"Are you okay, Marine?" Her voice returned to that of how Spartans usually talked: that of military diction and superiority. He'd been in battle before, been to war. He had been left alone behind enemy lines against a genocidal alien empire as a sole survivor, and when he had emerged into friendly hands they asked the same question. Then and there, he answered yes, truthfully.

_ **"No."** _

He went to the window of that apartment, looking at the stars. She too had already done that trick with her downtime. ODST and Spartan were given astronomy lessons, star gazing techniques that could be used on many planets. The way the stars outside were arranged however, it spoke to something very scary, and yet, very familiar. The star of that system had been burning bright: a red giant, and in a familiar cluster. The stars looked-

"This is _Alpha B_."

Very early on after the advent of the _Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine_ and humanity's initial push out, refueling stations needed to be put up to keep travel going. The star of Alpha B had played host to one of the largest ones, and, as technology and efficiency of sublight travel progressed it had been turned into a UNSC refit station.

It was something that Six had already known. They were very close to Earth then, and where they were now, wasn't supposed to look like this. She had been slow on her words, JD catching his breath. "Do you know the basic principle of slipspace travel, JD?"

Explained to everyone at some point in their life as early as elementary school: it had been the method of human space exploration and expansion. As important to mankind as the conical bullet, agriculture and, perhaps, the Spartans.

Take a string and then tie it into a knot, and then tie that knot into a knot, and then again, and again, and again until a path that one could follow with that string becomes almost infinitely maze-like and uneven. To get from one end of the string to the other by simply following the path of the string on the way meant to deal with the detours and twisting turns which could've been all been bypassed by simply, while still in contact with the string, bypassing or going over the knots. That bypassing, that loophole in travel, was what humanity had known as Slipspace Travel.

A crumpled piece of paper, jumping over a gap, tributaries and streams… the analogies went on in describing slipspace travel, but, simply, as Tobias Fleming Shaw and Wallace Fujikawa had discovered, using extra-dimensional planes of space as a method of transit from one distant location to another.

JD nodded at Six's question.

"And you know that we used Savannah's Slipspace Drive as a weapon to destroy that Super Carrier, right?"

It was all in the mission briefing. Another nod.

No destination solution. No proper safety accommodations. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and this was how it played its hand to the ODST and Spartan, and the millions of Covenant that had come with them. Slipspace travel hadn't been 100% safe, nor the drives that used them.

_**"Do you think…?"**_ Six asked.

Jon-James Durante was silent: a quiet man. That was very different from being at a loss for words as he was right now.

All he could do was reiterate the intel he had to her.

The year was 2183 AD. They were in a star system they both recognized, and yet was utterly different. They had been taken custody by a human alliance who had no idea who they were, or any of what had identified them as. The System Alliance knew not of the Covenant, nor the thirty-year war that had made their two new guests who they were. They had arrived after the usage of a piece of machinery and engineering which played with a not-quite-well understood concept of extra-dimensional travel. They used that machinery improperly, without a destination solution set, and still, as the charge of it ran out, did not reappear over Reach.

For the ten minutes that he had been given, there was nothing to say. To say anything meant to accept an impossibility, and as the doors open again revealing Ryder and Alenko to escort one of them back, they hadn't moved from that window. They were silent, biding their time, a war in their own minds running through them. Some thoughts shared, some thoughts not.

They turned to face them, only to turn away again, last words, hushed whispers.

"I'm going to cooperate." JD said, resolutely.

"That quick?" Six seemed disappointed.

"If what I think happened, has happened… We're just lucky we're in the hands of humans." He licked his lips, turning back around. "Can we have five more minutes?"

"No." Ryder answered immediately. "Who's first?"

"I'm not going to talk. There's still too much we don't know." Six had said, back still turned, words to the wall.

"We have to give some to get some. This is a negotiation for _**our lives**_."

Six shook her head subtly. "My life is not mine."

Just because JD had seen her without her armor didn't mean she wasn't a Spartan anymore. There were still mysteries about her like a fragrance. Though he could guess those mysteries as he had reached out and touched her shoulder. She recoiled away, still he went on. "ONI, the Corps, the UNSC, the Covenant. I _**don't think they matter anymore**_. _**They're not here**_ Six." He was pleading, and he felt himself getting winded again.

"This could just be some Insurrectionist ploy. Some trick."

"Then why didn't you blow your armor?" Six was surprised that this ODST knew of that capability of MJOLNR. "You know _**Cole Protocol**_ is clear."

She grunted. "Only applies to the Covenant."

Ryder had been getting impatient as he entered the room fully. "Will you talk?"

"One moment." JD had just short of ordered to the man who had rank on him. "What other explanation is there? I know it sounds crazy, but so is Slipspace travel. Tell me that it doesn't not make sense, right here, right now."

He didn't strain his voice with her. He spoke lowly, carefully. He spoke life his father questioning a witness who had everything within them to break a case.

"Say it to me." He barely heard her, but he did.

"You know what it is." He whispered back.

"Please. JD." Her voice dropped, she sounded normal, she sounded pleading. "_**Say it.**_"

Had others lost in Slipspace accidents suffered the same fate? Those missing in action and lost to the void? Is this what had actually happened to the Spirit of Fire?

Questions that still floated in JD's head, but put into word and sentence and statement for Six.

"With what we did with that Slipspace Drive, without a destination solution considered, we were dropped into a dimension not our own. _**This isn't our galaxy**_, or even _**our universe**_. We're a long way from home, _**and I don't think we can ever go back**_."

Six would take part in a self-fulfilling prophecy, spoken to every UNSC servicemember who looked to the Spartans for hope and prayer in that long war. There was a saying that had been official policy, and a standard for all those who had the title of Spartan: _**Spartans never die. They're just missing in action. **_And so that was what she had become, alongside an ODST who had survived for far too long.

She looked at him dead in the eyes. A thousand-yard stare turned into a thousand years. Spartan time kicked in for her.

She knew what a liar was like, and JD was not one. She saw only the stars reflected in his eyes. She curled her lip, head shaken once. A decision far harder than making the decision to kill, to leave men behind, and become a Lone Wolf had crossed her heart. As hard a decision as it was when she sacrificed herself on behalf of her mother to become a Spartan-III. It went against the very person she had been today, her training and conditioning screaming at her.

Conditions had changed though and, she hated this, hated that JD putting it into words had made it sound more like the truth than a false narrative, did what she needed to do.

She nodded at him and snapped around to Ryder. _**"I'll go first."**_

The N7 had affirmed, Alenko putting himself in between Six and JD for safety. The Commander had grabbed her arm and begun to lead her out. "Yeah. I've seen some action."

The man was surprised he answered and remembered. "Yeah. I can tell when people have fought Batarians."

_He didn't know._

As Six began to be lead out JD had suddenly moved past Alenko, just short of reaching out. "Six! _**What's your name**_?!"

The door closed before she could give an answer.

* * *

Another round of questioning, and this time, it had gone well. JD fought against his own training surely, but he had made his mind up. There nothing left to do but tell them who he was.

Sunglasses' questions had been more political in nature. Cleft-Lip: Military. Ryder, both of them thought, had been there for security, however they realized that wasn't entirely true. He knew how to talk the talk: piercing questions that made them uneasy.

It didn't help for the first question he had to answer now with everything on the table had been what Six's name was.

"Look, we only met like, 13 hours ago. I don't know her, and she doesn't know me."

"The way you two communicate begs to differ." Ryder had been more observant. "The way you too read each other's faces, your eyes. Not many people can do that so intensely."

JD rolled his eyes. If only people said he and his last girlfriend had the same connection. "We wear helmets 95% of the time. We're good at reading movements, faces if we can. Covert operations and that. Hand signals and orders, language of the body, it's useful to pick up."

* * *

_I was trained to be non-verbal. The enemy can often speak the same language, so we spared our breath. That and, well, there was a certain type of language that people like me often used. It's a shorthand communication system that is something of our own and, some of them are easy to pick up. I think he was able to._

_…._

_No. I don't know his name. I just call him JD. He's a Private too. But I can't tell you much past that. I met him about twelve hours ago and… separating would be not ideal in this situation._

* * *

Glasses and Cleft-Lip had been ecstatic that they were now talking, and there hadn't seemed to be any pretenses of falsehoods. To assume that someone was telling the truth was dangerous, but the truth was easy to say to those who knew it as fact. They weren't saying it to save themselves. They were saying it because that's how they thought it was. For that very moment the two agents had assumed that it had been fact, even if what it meant something incredible.

"We're glad you've decided to cooperate, and as the situation in Altis begins to be uncovered, we have been advised to take your word for it in the meantime. If you're a man of the-… A Marine Corps, we trust you must have the honor to stand by the words which you say."

He nodded. Ryder had told the two men in black that he hadn't said anything when captured initially. He chose his words carefully.

"For the sake of the lives on… "Altis" then, I want to talk about them first, not me-"

"We have the situation well in hand Mister Durante." JD cringed again, but he let it pass. "And seeing as we have you before us we actually think that you're the most pressing matter we have." Cleft-Lip explained.

* * *

_"No. Whoever is on that planet right now is in danger. You have ships in orbit, we saw. Evacuate your men from the surface and just bombard that wreckage and any alien species you see down there. Do it. The Covenant needs to be wiped out right here, right now, while they're down, there's not going to be another shot if they recover and start mobilizing."_

_"It's not in Alliance policy to bombard a planet's surface from orbit, especially habitable ones. And especially not any species that we've just made First Contact with"_

_"First Contact? Don't worry about policy or diplomacy. You. Need. To. _ _ **Kill them All** _ _. They will not listen any other way."_

* * *

"Respectfully I disagree." JD rubbed his fingers together, anxious. "The Covenant-"

"The Covenant." Sunglasses had parroted. "Both you and your friend have referred to all those aliens down there as such. That implies religious zealotry is their main motivation."

_**"Your destruction is the will of the gods, and we are their instrument." **_Words quoted from history, to the first responders of Harvest, spoken by Prophets. It was what JD had said now, chills from the decades lost coursing through his skin. "You can't reason with them, you can't deal with them. It's them or us. You have to **kill them all**."

All three questioners had made their mental notes on both of them: They'd probably hailed from a militaristic society indoctrinated on xenophobia. Whether it was because of prejudice or the justification of an alien crusade was yet to be seen. Reports coming back from Altis didn't' seem to push in either direction.

"Is that your official recommendation as a Private?"

"Yes."

* * *

_"I'd do it myself."_

* * *

Cleft-Lip leaned in, a familiar pair of tags in his hands. "So then, where you came from, what did you do to add to that effort? You are a Marine, correct?" A Devil Dog, surely. He had gestured as if to throw, and JD had opened up one hand ready. It jingled as it tossed, and when it landed in his hands his tags still were the same as ever. They went around his neck, mouthing a thanks.

"For the last eight years I've been in the UNSC Marine Corps. One year as a regular infantry, the next seven: a shock trooper."

"Your armor, even compared to your friends, was very interesting. "_**ODST**_" is very prevalent on it. Is that what you are? An ODST?" Cleft-Lip spoke.

JD started slowly, thoughtfully, gaining speed and strength as he toyed with his fingers, but not bothering him. "I'm an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper. We're first responders and deep strike oriented forces. We deploy directly from shipboard to the ground in less than five minutes. They drop us in specially designed pods we ride alone, and when we hit ground we come out swinging. What we do? Well, a little of everything. Clandestine operations if it was any human radical groups, and otherwise, against the Covenant, we just know how to punch hard and in the right place."

Cleft-Lip, Ryder, and Sunglasses seemed confused. "Shipboard to ground in less than five minutes? How?"

"We're dropped."

* * *

_He's what I know as an ODST. Orbital Drop Shock Trooper. They're the desperate measures of the Marine Corps, they come in when reinforcements need to be deployed in an area regular transport can't get to, or for special ops. They're as surgical an instrument as anything the Marines have, even when he's literally dropped from space in an iron coffin and smashing to the ground. I've ridden an ODST pod down a handful of times and it's rough, to say the least._

* * *

Ryder had tapped his fingers on the desk, thoughtfully, looking to the one-way window. There was still a question on his mind, a question that was more personal than most.

"_**Then what is she?"**_

"I told you already I don't know who-"

"Not who. _**What**_."

JD was caught half way into his breath as the question crossed his mind. Every Marine, every human who had seen the vids, the images, the reports of them asked the same question. Armor clad monsters of men and women, who came to the outer colonies and bested the Covenant when no one else could. Shrugging off cannon fire, plasma shots, explosions and the might of an alien enemy so lethal extinction stared them in the face. It was only until, amazingly, a few hours prior did he ever see a Spartan in the flesh, and it had been six of them come from a detachment of the UNSC Army.

"Her rank, her name, her unit, that armor she's wearing. We need it all." That is what Cleft-Lip said. He wanted it. Wanted it bad.

It was still very hard to let go any of this information, because it felt like he was still letting go to the Insurrectionists. But these weren't Innies. They knew very well of what the Spartans were, at least when they were on the field. There was something that the Covenant had called them all, and, he wasn't quite sure if it was some sort of propaganda to make the UNSC feel good about their chances, feel good about the Spartans, but she was… she was-

"_A demon_." JD let slip from his lips. Ryder tilted his head, concerned.

The Covenant, the Elites in particular, had called the Spartans demons. In an organization which prided itself on its faith, to be called a demon was perhaps a compliment in some way. It only served to make the Spartans so much more mysterious, so much of an enigma, than was humanly possible.

JD sputtered, coughing, shaking his head to dismiss the last thing he said. "She's a _**Spartan**_. And that's all I can really say."

* * *

_Ryder asked her the same question, about herself, but she said nothing. Her lips tightening, her jaw clenching. She knew who she was, that much was sure, but there was an apprehensiveness in her to tell that aloud that made Ryder know that it was a secret._

_"Where's my armor?" She said instead._

_"It was delivered with the Normandy, along with Mister Durante's armor."_

* * *

"I don't know **her name**. Don't know **her rank**. Don't know what we called that armor of hers…" JD drifted, thinking back to the battles he had heard before his time as an ODST, of a group of green armored Spartans deploying from Pelicans into the middle of embattled city centers and lifting the siege, saving the local populace. "But all I know that she was one of the only people that would've stood a chance to _**save us all**_ from the Covenant."

Ryder wanted to pin JD to get an answer out. "But why then, what makes her special? What is a Spartan?"

There was a darkness within JD, one brought upon by surviving the battles he had fought and realizing that he could do nothing to win that war as much as Six could. "I don't know where they came from, but the Spartans are supersoldiers, a hundred times a soldier than you or me could ever be. They fight faster, shoot harder, kill harder than anyone has right to. If it wasn't for the fact they were on our side, I'd be scared of them." The words flowed out of him without even thinking.

"Are you scared of her then?"

JD sighed. "A little bit. _**But I know she's human**_."

"Surely this is just exaggeration, her capabilities. If we take away her armor, what would be left?" Sunglasses opened his hand to the air.

The ODST shook his head. "No, _**you don't understand**_. These Spartans, rumor has it they've been doing this since birth. Maybe they were some UNSC black project, our final resort when the Covenant first appeared, but you take away her armor, it still remains. She's still a Spartan. She will kill you, if you cross her, because that's all they do."

"Is she that dangerous?"

"To the Covenant yes."

In another file, different from the ones the men in black were putting together, in another universe, was a one put together by those who made the Spartans. Doctor Halsey's analysis of Six had been that of a "Hyper-Lethal Vector." Had JD known Six had made entire insurrectionist colonies disappear, maybe he would've said differently. Though Doctor Halsey's file had been more important, impactful. She knew what a Spartan was, and Spartan B-312, from a Spartan program she did not endorse or even have knowledge of, was very much equal to her best. What that meant was the culmination of human history and survival.

_"More than human."_ That's what Doctor Chakwas declared her. The first time JD had even known that the Spartans were biologically different in a way nature would not allow.

Humankind had a next step, and she was already down the road.

Ryder leaned back in his chair. Six was very much dangerous. Among the corpses his fireteam had found on that island, many of them had been done in by knife alone, and the one that they had found clasped into her armor as an attachment on her hip was very, very well worn. He wondered if she kept it dull on purpose.

"Is the Covenant deserving of such a danger?"

"They are genocidal aliens, commander. _**Out for all humanity**_." JD's voice was quiet, held back, flat and polite. That's how it usually was, no threat in it from a man who'd spent a decade as a Marine in a conflict that spanned over a thousand worlds. That question alone yielded passion from him. If they knew who he was however more as visitor from another place, they would know that the passion came not from him. It was the grit in his voice and the sorrow read in his eyes, the way his molar clamped for one second as it held an angry man back. That passion came from nearly 800 men he had, alone, been the survivor of. Platoons, companies, entire battalions and ships, all had only him to survive through in the war. How many drops gone wrong had he survived? Too many. How many men and women slipped away in his arms and had to bury with nothing more than a torn up ODST flag he kept in his chest piece? He didn't even start out as a combat medic, either in the ODSTs or as a regular grunt, but he became one just a year ago because he was sick of not being able to do anything to save those around him. He was a terrible medic, but he'd get better or die trying.

"How can you prove that? The situation on Altis right now seems contained, and this "Covenant" doesn't seem interested in combat."

His hands laid flat against the table, the urge to flip it grinding through him like chalk on concrete. He knew they were genocidal because _**he'd been to war**_. Entire armadas of their most advanced ships, cut down by forces a third their size: hundreds of thousands of lives lost in a blink of an eye. Millions, huddled together in shelters and coffins, buried alive and glassed without mercy. It wasn't a war. It was a slaughter, and he was on the losing side. Before he had actually taken that table to flip he had drew in one breath before letting go.

"My helmet is laced with recording software. Cameras, data records, and internal memory banks that go back as long as I've had that helmet."

"Which is how long?"

This was his second helmet. _**"Five years."**_

For him, he realized, as always, it was better to show than to tell.

Sunglasses had his omni-tool flare up, typing in commands to probably get his helmet to a secure location for cracking.

JD spent the next two hours in that room, spilling his guts and his memory onto the table for everyone in there to dissect and hear. He had gone after Six, and Six had spent three hours before him going through the same process.

What had been revealed in those meetings and all of the subsequent ones that had followed had become one of the most classified secrets in the galaxy, if not galaxies. As high in tier as the Asari's Prothean Secret in Thessia, or the Shadow Broker's identity. As classified and underneath black tape as the true origins of the Spartan Program or the identities of those Spartans. To the men in black, it sounded as if a fleshed-out science fiction world held in the mind of a brilliant author had been reiterated with perfect memory to them: a genocidal alien power come to test all who did not abide, FTL without the Relays, a war unimaginable with casualties that had been more than doubled the current population of the Alliance. It wasn't fiction however. To Six, and JD, it was real. It had been their reality. It _**was**_ their reality that they had been taken from. In each of them a drive to go back: to finish the fight.

That was how good of a soldier they each had been.

Even Ryder had been impressed, but also the questions that engrossed everyone who knew the situation finally took him over. He didn't care that it was his final tour with the Alliance. It didn't matter. He thought the ODST would be the same: the war wasn't going well at all and he just had to ask, why even bother? There would be lesser men to fill his boots.

"But why, Private? Why suffer for as long as you have? It seems like you could've been transferred off the front to train other shock troopers."

JD scoffed at it. "There will always be someone better than me. And if I can save their life in exchange for mine… If I can save anyone..." He held a hand to his face before dragging down, digging dirt and sweat and whatever grit had accumulated on his eyelashes out. "I have to believe that we will win this war because we've saved lives. Not ended them. Eventually someone is better than me, surely, will save us all. I just have to _**believe**_."

Cleft-Lip had scratched near the cleft as he figured a response that was brewing as JD said that. Something that would give them an answer to a question that hadn't been asked yet, but would present to Six. "Someone like the Spartans? Like _**her**_?"

Throughout these meetings, as each was cycled back and forth without rest or time to confide in one another, one thing was abundantly clear: their want for the aliens on Altis to be blasted to ash.

They were insane, said Ryder during the lull in between one session, no one would want to actually blow away a million souls. The footage revealed from JD's helmet however had revealed all after his identification code.

Five years of combat footage, seemingly from another reality, had manifested in a collection that had shown the man's status as a veteran. It would take years to dissect all that footage. The fact that the helmet had five years of combat footage on it had been a technological marvel unto itself, scarier still then, as the scientists and engineers looking into the ODST's kit had said, the armor of the woman had alone been almost eldritch in implication.

Six had offered no access to her helmet or anything related to the armor, when asked after JD had gone ahead and offered his during the first real session. She wasn't comfortable with that yet.

But with JD's footage alone now on the table and seen they had begged them. _**"Kill them. Kill them all."**_

Whoever they were they were ready to do so on their own, with nothing more than rocks and twigs and their own two hands. The Alliance however was not ready to become genocidal in response to those who committed genocide. The lessons of the Salarians and Turians put upon the Krogan had been one learned every day a Krogan acted out against Council space.

Everything about them, about that request, was them on their knees begging them to go to war against a species that they had just entered First Contact with. They would do it themselves and they begged for that as well.

"We'll keep it in mind, but we won't go to war on your word alone." The men in black said.

That wasn't enough for them.

"We are not winning this war." There was sorrow in JD's voice. He remembered where'd he come from. He remembered what it was. Reach: Humanity's fortress world. Second only to Earth. "_**I think we've lost**_." He sounded so broken, and for all the determination and focus of the Spartan, she was broken the same, if not more.

"I'm sorry, but _this war does not exist here_." Sunglasses made clear to both of them, reminding of their acceptance of their situation. _**"Not here."**_

Six disagreed however. Disagreed with the taste of blood in her mouth and a million Covenant dead in her service to humanity. The war was still here if there was Covenant alive. For that however, she offered something that changed their minds.

* * *

_"The Alliance doesn't have enough men to fight the type of war describe, nor are we morally able to given our conventions. Out of our thirty colonies, hardly half of them are above a million. That isn't enough to sustain any sort of war against anyone quite frankly."_

_Sunglasses said._

_"Only thirty colonies?"_

_"Yes… why?'_

_"If you heed our warnings, if you just listen to us. Please. I will give you something that'll make it worth fighting the Covenant for."_

_Eyebrows were raised, disbelief on their faces. What could make humanity throw that many lives away? To commit such great atrocities such as an intergalactic war that burned entire planets?_

_What Six had offered was something that the Council could never do, if not stopped them from doing. What the conventions of their FTL method had done was something that Six did not need to consider. Not with her history._

_Six had offered them the world, in a manner of speaking._

* * *

They were returned to, as per their cooperation, not a cell, but the regular quarters they were dumped in. Understandably they had to share one. It hadn't the dark dorms of a UNSC starship, or the barracks planetside of any number of military bases. No, it had been civilian accommodations inside the seat of human power in the cosmos. For the first time in a long while, ever since their enlistment with the UNSC, JD and Six had been civilians again and treated as such. There were no locks on the door they found out (to the alarm of the posted guards), no cameras around, just a quaint room to share and to take hold of the situation.

In between sessions they had hardly any time to scope the room more than once to check for cameras or bugs, but in reality, it didn't matter. What rest they could get was taken when one or the other had been brought in to be questioned.

Time had been indistinct in space, and no clock was given to them. As far as Six could guess it'd been another twelve hours since they arrived, and all of it was spent either getting terrible sleep or answering questions that seemed condescending to them, trivial, but eventually, understandable.

For the first time in that day they had been left alone, not traded out or tapping each other in. There was relief and comfort in that.

They'd met only still a miniscule amount of hours prior, but they were each all that they had.

"How did they all go, past all of our history stuff? They asked that right?" She finally asked, having taken a corner of the room to stand in, one nearest the window, looking out.

JD shrugged. "It was more you than me."

"More you than me…" Six parroted, a finger at her lips, scratching the skin around, pulling on tabs of losing hanging lip skin.

He went to the sink of the kitchenette of the room, pulling on the faucet as hot water instantly came out from its spout. He had looked through the metal cabinets, pulling two plastic cups out before filling them with cold water. A cursory glance toward the supposed stove had revealed some form of luxury, a quick peek inside of the refrigerator revealing nothing but save some sort of unidentifiable package that seemed to hint toward keeping the refrigerator clean. He was a little disappointed. It'd been year since he'd cooked for himself, been year since he had something that hadn't been field rations or mass produced meal sets meant for Navy.

"Here." He offered her the cup, and she took it, her hands still covered by that one body suit. The texture of it revealing the gleam of scales and metal almost. Titanium perhaps, JD thought. She nodded in a thanks as she drank in the liquid, clearing her throat.

The ships that they viewed through that one view window was revealing, the station below coupled with the busy fleet maneuvers of those ships on patrol or on their way out to somewhere else. Their geometric, blocky designs, although reminiscent of human designs as they knew it, weren't the same. White and reds, not grays and blacks. If it was different to them, it screamed foreign, hostile. That was not the case though and, sooner, rather than later, they realized where they were and how deep they were in. They were far deeper than anyone had ever been: in another universe, far, far, far, impossibly far, from home.

They talked without looking at each other, not ready for that yet. To speak while staring at each other's face, especially in their type of work, carried a certain connotation. It meant that you were willing to remember someone's face in the war, and if they had died that face would haunt the survivor's dreams. "They told me your name, you know."

He had asked them that after so many sessions in, not being able to talk to Six and get an answer. They told him.

"Yeah?" She asked. Back against the wall, eyes closed. She wasn't comfortable with that.

"I'd like to hear it from you though. It's only right."

There was a strained silence. A Spartan talking to a regular man. It was disconcerting, but there was no choice. Whatever came next they'd be bonded together by circumstance and chance. They came from the same place, and that meant more than anything now.

Still, she resisted, keeping the silence, keeping her name to herself.

The water in their glasses was sipped at before anyone talked, and it had been JD. "It's your word against theirs. _**And I trust you more**_."

She shook her head, setting her glass down. She'd already broke one glass today just on her grip strength. She didn't know how to handle gentle objects like common household objects. Her strength played both ways in a fashion she'd never expected. "It's just not a question I'm asked often."

JD went to his dog tags, patting them against his chest once silently before rubbing his chin. "Name's not really, uh, Jay-Dee, you know. I'm sure that they've told you. I had to clarify that when they asked me my name." Six gave him a side glance, letting him continue. "My name's _**Jon**_."

Her ears perked up. She had known a John before. That John hadn't known her, but then again, everyone knew of John. _**John-117**_.

"Like…?" She started. Jon nodded, a small smirk on his face, remembering who he was talking to.

"Yes. _The Master Chief_. No H though." It was a common name, to be fair, but that name had weight as if it couldn't be shared. "One of my old squads, used to tease me about it all the time. One day they painted my armor up green. Said I was their own personal Master Chief."

"Just as good?" Six wondered. He shrugged at what he assumed was a joke.

The Spartan-IIs were still an enigma in some ways, even if she was one. It was only in idle chatter between missions while talking to one, Jorge, during her miniscule time with Noble Team, that she had insight that hadn't been outright classified to her. He didn't reveal much about him, but there wasn't much else to be said but- _"We grew up together. He was always special. Halsey had her eye on him, always. Of everything he was, luck was always on his side... A natural leader."_

She refused to talk, even vaguely, about the Spartan Program. Bits and pieces, not ready to explain why her bones were coated in metal and her nerves and neural pathways had obviously been tampered with based on scans. She gave barely anything away about her black under suit or her armor, vaguely hinting that any tampering would detonate it (a half truth).

She gave up the war, the history of the UNSC, what she was capable of ("_Don't test me"_), what humanity had to sacrifice and the nature of the Covenant. But she did not give up herself.

"Well, I've got a two parter." JD rolled his head on his shoulders with the technicality.

"Huh?"

"Hyphen." He drank his own water, looking out of the window. "That's the reason my name comes up weird on the HUD as "JD"."

"Is that so?"

He nodded. "_**Jon-James Durante.**_"

When was the last time she had a conversation like this? One that wasn't steeped with either in regards to the mission, the circumstances of a mission, her gear or anything remotely related to military operations. She hadn't cared, but she didn't know otherwise. She didn't remember.

"Why is that?"

JD shrugged. "My Mom wanted Jonathan. Dad wanted Jameson."

Six fidgeted at the talk of parents. "How are they? Your mother? You father?"

JD also twinged, but his face softened. He dealt with this pain long ago. "They've passed."

"Oh… I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Not unless you killed them."

"Were they active?" Servicemembers that is.

He shook his head. "Dad died of food poisoning. Mom of a broken heart after they reported me missing in action during Persei." He wasn't there for both of them because of the war, so he damned the war, and damned himself for a time. There was nothing he could've done however and he'd made his peace long ago.

"Do you miss them?"

JD smiled to himself. _Of course he did._

He had looked at her for a fleeting second, nodding. "I'm only human."

A pang in her chest had arisen, dark and cold. What did that mean? To be human?

"What about you? How about your parents?"

"Don't have any." There was a difference between telling a lie and being wrong. Unfortunately JD had seen Six had said both at the same time. He grunted through his clenched jaw.

"Well, I don't know about Dad, but in my experience…" He considered his words for a second. It was a little racy but it was his experience. How many underprivileged youths had his own Dad brought in? Sons and daughters of single parents? It was those who, despite the situation, and had Moms, that often grew out of crime that brought them away from his father's station. "_**Everyone's got a Mom**_. Every man, woman, and child."

Six knew it true. Knew it true deep in her heart. If they had even stripped that under suit from her they would've seen something that had been so tightly pressed between it and her skin it had left an impression on her flesh forever: a gift from her own mother. In the shape of a wooden wheel it was all that she had left of her Mother, and thus it laid over her heart and stayed there.

Silence stayed. Half a minute, a minute, half an hour, an hour. They weren't sure. Only the sound of the station's humming persisted until JD spoke again. His voice was becoming hoarse, though he figured he have to get used to it now. No one could speak for him but himself where they were. Not unless the Spartan before came to know him.

One step at a time however.

"What did your mother call you Six?"

Six had chuckled, leaning her head back, her black hair padding contact with the metal wall, cool and calming to a headache she hadn't felt in a long time. No, she wasn't avoiding giving him her name. The problem was she had no answer to really give without fighting herself. She was waiting within herself for an answer.

To JD it felt like she had been avoiding however. Though he was fine with that. Spartans would be Spartans. That wasn't his utmost concern however as he finished off his glass of water, placing it into the sink.

"Look, if they're gonna continue drilling us like this, I think it might be right if we rehearse with each other." He sat down on one of the chairs, head in hands, brown, layered hair run through by his fingers. "My security clearance might not exactly play well with the ONI spooks, but, ONI doesn't exist here, and we're the only people who will know what we're talking about outright."

"It'll feel a little more wrong to you. Because you know what you should and shouldn't know."

A breath JD was holding let go. "I get that." He played with his hands again. "I'm hiding things from them you know. I'm sure you are too. Given our circumstances though we shouldn't be hiding things from each other."

She glowered at him, a frown on her face as her eyes went half lidded. "I'm not your responsibility Jon… Is Jon alright?"

It was nice to hear his name he admitted to himself. Every single unit he had been assigned to gave him some sort of stupid nickname. "Ah, uh, JD is fine. Only people who I'm close to ever call me by one of my first names."

She mouthed 'okay'. "Still though. I'm not your problem."

"You wouldn't be a problem." He spoke firmly. Said what needed to be said and nothing else. It saved his breath. "You weren't a problem when you detonated that bomb without alerting anyone, and you weren't a problem when I came back to back you up from those Elites. UNSC doesn't exist here, but we were both its troopers."

"Thank you." she blurted out. It caught both of them by surprise, and it took a moment for Six to know what that knee jerk thanks was for. "… for coming back."

He opened his hands, nodding once. No big deal. She would've done the same, right?

Lone Wolf. That's what they called her and she embraced it.

_"That lone wolf stuff stays behind, clear?" _That's what Carter told her not that long ago. She didn't listen. Not when she cast Jorge back to Reach and planned to complete the operation herself. She wondered why Carter had asked her that. Was it because of pure tactical philosophy behind being a part of a team? Or was it because he cared? She never doubted that Carter cared about those who he commanded, but did he care for her as a person? On a fundamental level that Spartans were told to have with each other, but supposedly unable with a regular Marine? A regular man?

The reason why she was protesting she felt and knew why. It was because she wanted to be that Lone Wolf.

Their world had literally changed though. Moments of silence passed, minutes of thoughtful consideration and peace. The adrenaline was only now starting to settle. She was hard to kill, but not intractable. A Spartan had to be flexible to survive. She agreed with herself. Yeah, that was what it was, adapting to a new field.

She sucked in her cheeks, the spit in her mouth, swallowing and taking in air through her nose. The filtration system in this room hadn't been as good as some UNSC ships, this Systems Alliance? They had a great deal to learn.

Their eyes had caught again to talk and she let go.

"_**Mai.**_" The Spartan looked him dead in the eye. "My name is _**Mai**_."

_**Spartan Mai-B312**_.

She was the woman who would've carried Cortana to the hands of Captain Keyes and the Pillar of Autumn, and forward to the Master Chief. Her actions would've led to the end of the war, from Halo, to the Ark.

She had given her name to the ODST who would've helped uncover The Artifact beneath New Mombassa. She would've been gun down after completing her mission, _**stabbed in the gut**_ by an energy sword while in a dirty ditch, left behind as the Great Journey started without her. The ODST in question would've suffered a similar fate, _**shot in the back of the head**_ by another human in the name of some extremist cause pushed asides by the Covenant. They both didn't die well, they didn't die painlessly, and it wasn't quick. _**That was the future they had**_ in another universe, a part to be played by a history they would never see to.

Whatever had happened by their loss, their removal from their reality, would perhaps never be known.

Yet, despite it all, they were who they are.

"When were you born?" She asked him. He didn't look old, didn't look young either, but look as if a man in his prime, ready to get cut down.

"2525." He answered. "Was born on Luna… how about you?"

Her training told her everything which she was about to do was wrong, but her military did not exist her, her service holding no value. What values she did carry could be only that of a soldier's. Regardless, in the end, they were all human there.

It began. It was better to practice with him, to say her history to someone who could understand, than to the intelligence services and the soldiers of this reality.

* * *

"Mai Gul, 26 years of age, Arab ancestry tracing back to something very analogous to West Asia, and, more specifically, Palestine. Born in the year 2525 on a colony called "New Jerusalem". According to her that would mean that planet is within Council Space. As far as she can recollect she was born into abject poverty and never knew her parents and thus, according to the Spartan-III program which she claims to be a part of, that meant she was an ideal candidate due to her lack of familial ties. Further notes on her home life can be found in the supplementary data, but in summary we have a colonial with nothing to lose and everything to give. She's been a trained killing machine her entire life, and to what she knew of her own biographical details from her military's intelligence, she was the _**best killer**_ in their ranks."

The N7 had thrown her new file onto the table after he read it, unsure of what to do with it. He wasn't the only one however. For having been requested out of the blue to handle a First Contact situation, he had handled everything well enough, both Hackett and Anderson decided.

Admiral Hackett wasn't one to be speechless, but in the recent events of the day he was reaching for words. "In a universe where humanity was able to expand to over _**800 colonies**_, she was the best soldier they had?"

He was communicating them via video conference from his quarters in the SSV Kilimanjaro, the events over Altis still unfolding as more and more Council ships jumped into the area. There had been some heavy developments, but nothing disastrous. If anything progress was being made.

In that room had also been the two questioners from Alliance Intelligence, their names not even known to Ryder or Anderson.

Ryder had nodded, thumbing his chin. "All, save one, and she wasn't quite sure if he existed in reality."

She was a conundrum, an enigma, greater than even the legions and legions of prisoners they had taken from the Covenant they fought against.

The three men were unable to understand. By what possible way could they quantify that? How could something like lethality be able to be quantified that made Mai become, supposedly, the embodiment of death itself in the galaxy that she came from. What qualities did she have that they could not see or have did not know yet? Matriarch Benezia, Nakmor Drack, Saren Arterius, these names floated in their heads as they considered people as deadly as Six apparently, and they had either age or mandates behind them. Yet with every implication of Six's skill and ability, it felt like that she was greater than them still.

The Covenant regarded her as a _**Demon**_. Unholy, without bounds. She was not someone to be underestimated. They didn't even give any of their own men any respect.

"Do you vouch for her skill Ryder?" Hackett asked the man who had been in contact with her the most.

He crossed his arms, remembering how the death glare she gave looked every time he had transgressed on her in any way. He remembered the bodies left behind. He remembered her answers to their questions. "Without testing her. No. She's trained, deadly, and her armor as we're lead to believe is unlike anything we've ever seen."

Anderson nodded in agreement.

"It's not an exosuit?" Hackett inquired.

Anderson shook his head in the negative. "Our techs, using Durante's credentials, have been able to access his video recordings. They extend five years via some compression algorithm that progressively shrinks a video file until it's called upon, however the events of the last twenty-four hours from his point of view is currently being dissected. What it caught of Gul's abilities in battle, her suit is unlike anything we've ever seen."

The Kinetic Barriers and Biotic Shields that the Marines fielded were coming up as ineffective against the Covenant weapons when the Covenant had engaged. It cut through men, and only the plating of their armor was able to barely stave off pure penetration and instant death. That was only with those that wore the bulkiest of issued armor. When the Turians tried they had ended up with three casualties as their scouting party was cut down by a squad of what had been labeled as "Grunts" by JD and Mai.

They were outnumbered twenty to one, and they came back in critical condition, within an inch of their life.

Salarian snipers that had set up were pinned down by the scavenger race of "Jackals", and it certainly didn't help that the Covenant had taken home field advantage.

The Asari hadn't tried a military solution, but they were reluctant to meld, especially if a common language was already established. Still they had been the saving grace of the Covenant. The Turians had deployed what ships could be allowed with Human space as per security agreements made after the First Contact War and were raring for a fight. JD and Mai would've been pleased, if not joined them, but everyone else had been quick to remind that they would be bombarding a human planet, regardless of the occupants.

Had another war-like species like the Krogan come? Should contact be cut off if the Alliance's reports are to be believed?

The issues that arised in this was that the Council task force arrived in preparation of a First Contact. All pretenses of First Contact however were lost. This situation was new.

Hackett would handle that however, being onsite. This meeting was about Private Jon-James Durante and "Spartan" Mai B-312.

At least the Covenant realized they were in the same boat as Mai and JD found out on their own, and their religious crusade had to be on pause as they figured everything out amongst themselves. The first of the Asari who insisted on mind melding with the prisoners had been kept back the Marines. For the first time in the Council's history, the Asari, nor the translation software of the galactic community, was not needed to communicate.

"Why?" they asked.

The answer had been the reason the Prime Minister, Admiral Hackett, and Ambassador Udina had been suddenly confined to their respective offices and grilled with a million questions that all could be answered with: "We don't know."

That was the answer they had given, but now they did know in all actuality thanks to the two humans recovered. The wrecks of the "UNSC Savannah" and anything that had remotely been UNSC had been quickly brushed under the rug by the Alliance as the Task Force from the Citadel was immersed in Object Alpha, taken in and hidden by the Fifth Fleet. They'd been small enough to hide, and as they hid Alliance survey teams had been going through them.

"They've been becoming more reactive. Mai is still holding back some details about the Spartan Program, but we're getting enough out of her gradually that we're not concerned about her keeping that closed indefinitely. It all matches up with Durante's too." Sunglasses had reported promptly, as if a report from the factory line.

Cleft-Lip had balled his hand into a fist, holding it to his cheek and leaning. Everyone had a reason to speak, but he wondered what their reason was. "But why would they tell us anything at all? If what the scientists are saying is correct, their form of FTL travel did indeed throw them a dimension away from home. Why would they even entertain us?"

Slipspace travel had been the dream of any military tactician in that world: The ability of the Relays to dictate space travel, had also been the ability to dictate how warfare was practiced. The Mass Effect Relays controlled inbound and outbound space traffic, and given that the civilizations of the galaxy had been spacefaring, both in civilian and military aspects, it meant that chokepoints could be established. Points of defense built up, honed over years and years with no ability to take them on save sabotage, espionage, or pure overwhelming force that one had thought feasible.

No one had thought feasible and practiced until two veterans of a thirty-year war that a humanity was involved in was had.

The UNSC had waged a war that had, in number alone, just on the human side, had been deadlier than every single war waged ever since the Asari had came upon the Citadel. A war so horrible, so insane, it was like looking into the abyss and having it stare back at them in the form of two soldiers who spoke of mistake after mistake, loss after loss, for thirty years.

There was a section of footage, in JD's video footage. It screamed of insanity.

It was footage of a world, pristine like Earth, green and vibrant, cities higher than any colony seen on their Earth. It was footage of a city center that the analyst had first thought as a riot, but no, everyone was running in the same direction. Even JD. He had a rifle in his hand but it was no use. Not when a ship whose body language was so much like object Alpha's had been out in the distance and above.

Its great bulbous head had emerged from the clouds like a monster, and the screaming and shouting had only intensified as everyone had ran into a building. Hundreds and hundreds of people. All human. JD didn't follow them however. The building had been some sort of town hall or capital building, and he found ample platform to hoist himself on to.

When he had turned around the vision of the video saw those who had been dressed like him. More ODSTs. He had reached down to drag them up and they had done the talking for him: Yelling for people to get inside as the ship in the clouds inched closer and closer. The stream of people were endless, and it hadn't been clear what they were running from.

Six and JD, they didn't ask questions of where they were yet. Not when they knew they were among the Alliance. That would come later. But if they did, the conversation would've drifted to the justification of Six's existence. Why did she need to be that deadly?

She would say she wouldn't ever be able to be deadly enough. She had been kin with the Krogan, for the Genophage, for Tuchanka, and all that it meant.

From that bulbous head of the Covenant ship, a bright, vibrant light burned. Burned hot from its emitter. Bright as the sun, hot as a star.

When it hit ground, miles away, it took the breath away of those who saw the footage.

What it had done to JD was worse:

One of the ODSTs that had gotten with him on the platform had looked at him dead in the eye: his back to the beam. He didn't want to look as fire and fury came down the street and evaporated hundreds of people in a cloud of destruction. A blast, destructive. Worse than a nuke even. A nuke was fire and forget. Whatever this was ("It's what the Covenant call Glassing.") it was pure hatred made real, made into a weapon, and it threw the ODST onto JD as he bore the brunt of whatever it was.

Helmet to helmet, visor to visor, JD had seen a man lay on top of him as the building collapsed and shielded them from that cloud of destruction. But because of it he had to see a man burn to death, to skin and bone, and he could do nothing about it.

This was the price they had to pay for humanity.

"_**Because we're human."**_

"Explain Captain Anderson." Ryder looked to the man on the other end of the table.

The good captain picked up the folder, thumbing through the digital pages of the data pad.

"They just came from a genocidal war against a species that threatened to obliterate humankind. If the Council hadn't stepped in during the First Contact War we might've been the same as them. No factions, no differing beliefs, just us against them." He blew breath from his mouth, looking to the ceiling. "It was us against them. Without fellow man, they stood no chance against this Covenant. They trust us because we are human; to them, we share blood."

Captain Anderson knew what that meant during the First Contact War, face to face with an alien species. The Turians would know what it meant to fight against humans; humans who had just been given the answer that they were not alone in the universe and, perhaps, from that time forward, they'd be fighting for the rest of their lives. If the battles during Shanxi in that three-month war felt like a lifetime, the three men there remembered, they couldn't imagine what it must've felt like to the shock trooper and the Spartan that had come to them. A quarter of a century, with no end in sight.

Hackett darkly looked out to the stars, remembering the words that came out of the shock trooper's mouth in regards to the war with the Covenant. _**"We were losing."**_

"What did Prime Minister Shastri talk to you about Anderson?" Ryder asked, as if it was something that wouldn't be classified.

Anderson aired the top of his head by taking his cap off briefly. "Reports about the… "Covenant" on Altis and how we're able to fight them if they end up as being something more we can handle. The Council Task Force has said that because it's in Alliance territory we would have to lead the response."

Cleft-Lip had groaned. "And the only ways that we've been advised right now is from Private Durante and Mai." Which wasn't an option.

"Leave that to me gentlemen, let's just run through the facts again."

The pad was reclaimed by the two men in black, but they didn't need to read off of it. They were good with details like this, Sunglasses and Cleft-Lip taking turns.

"The UNSC is, according to our guests, the military, exploratory, and scientific agency of the Unified Earth Government. The UEG is pretty much their equivalent of the Alliance, established in 2075 by the United Nations."

"The UN?"

"Yeah." Sunglasses nodded. "We're trying to find a point of divergence, but there's nothing concrete from their knowledge of their history that sticks out other than their FTL method... more on that later."

"Anyway, the UEG is the civilian government of Earth and all her colonies, and the UNSC is supposed to be under them."

"How could a government that big exist? We have enough trouble managing our colonies right now and we have only a fraction of that number." Ryder had pointed out a fact that also stared at them like an impossibility:

The number was staggering to them. Over 800. Over 800 human colonies spread out across the galaxy, and every single one became a battlefield for a war beyond their comprehension. How many billions dead had they failed to save? How many rounds fired in anger and needless death thrown at the feet of survival? They might've been human, but they were human in a way that spoke back to man at their most primal.

Perhaps what had been harder to swallow was that before the Covenant, Earth and her Colonies had been at war with themselves. That's why they had been so wary of them at first: they thought they had been "Insurrectionist". Those that had try to carve away from Earth's rule.

"Maybe we'll have to find out for ourselves eh?" Sunglasses rolled his head. There was mischief, opportunity, in his voice.

Mai's elaboration on the Spartan program was still topmost priority when it came to her, but there was another item she offered in the interim: it had been the most cooperative she'd been for some reason.

It was one that had ultimately pushed the Admiralty and the Intelligence Agents that had been Cleft-Lip and Sunglasses be patient over to keep them. It was a promise too large to imagine, yet so dutifully true as the first astrological scans from deep space outposts and glances from the long-range sensors could confirm to her.

_"We will give you the locations of _ _ **every single planet** _ _ that is capable of being colonized by humanity."_

There were conditions to consider, but the sampling she had given was beyond words.

"We can't even reach half those planets you know." Ryder had very much tried. For his service as one of the first through the Relays with Jon Grissom, he had been given the resources to search for more planets for humanity to colonize. The FTL method that had defined all space travel there had been constraining though. This wasn't the case for the UNSC or the Covenant.

"Not yet." Sunglasses thumbed at them like a cold fact. As if tomorrow they could.

"Their FTL method does not rely on Eezo, or the Relays. If anything, Element Zero was no factor in their universe. They weren't bound by it. An entire division of Alliance scientists had been waiting for the trigger to be pulled by the Prime Minister to start working toward such ends given the wreckage related to the UNSC over Altis.

Hackett had decided it well to mention this now. "Preliminary results of Debris Object Charlie are in. Gul and Durante identify it as the Frigate Savannah and, judging by identification engraved on on the inside we believe that's correct."

"Anything interesting?" Anderson leaned in toward the vid screen.

"We've yet to fully dissect what's left of the ship, but recon teams are reporting a lot of dead human crewmembers, along with weapons and gear that match Gul's and Durante's. The wreck is recent too, plasma dispersion and heat tests shows that it was only destroyed for two hours before they blipped into the system."

"Human? Without doubt?" Anderson pressed.

"Remains are in fact, 100% human. Those two are same as us."

"Any survivors?" Doubtful, but Ryder hoped there was someone who could also elaborate on Durante's and Mai's circumstances. Not that it'd matter, but more voices always helped.

"Negative. So no one who can confirm their stories." Hackett confirmed.

"Confirm that one is a god damn shock trooper who's dropped from space in a metal coffin, and the other is some sorta… genetically modified super soldier." Sunglasses and Cleft-Lip, they hailed from a place that made Six very weary about them. Ryder could tell. Military Intelligence was an oxymoron, but they weren't military intelligence. Occasionally, when internal matters of Earth had been in question about humanity, not in relation to anything about the galaxy or the Council, the Alliance had its own division of their Intelligence agencies dedicated.

Those two men had hailed from them.

"What do we do with them?" Ryder had been uneasy, but not inactive. For what they were, they were only two humans at the end of it. "I think keeping them buried would be unreasonable. They have no reason to act against us… Can't just drop them in a regular company though, not even an N-warfare group." Said their manhandler. It meant something.

Hackett nodded. "If what I'm reading about this… ODST is correct, he's as capable as any graduate from the N7s. He's seen more combat than perhaps even you two, and, if all indications about his record is correct that he would be a war hero here."

"But he was only a grunt." Ryder shot back.

"As far as it seems every soldier in that war is a hero. But if he's the man that his record indicates, even if he was just a regular soldier in that war in the broad span of things, if he were here… well I can only think of one other person who would match his steel."

Anderson rose an eyebrow. "Who?"

_ **"Your new XO."** _

All the men there gradually nodded, understanding, finally putting an equivalent, a gauge, to the shock trooper.

"Then what about the Spartan? How about her?"

She was the unknown quantity, a mystery to be unfurled and what they could see so far wasn't particularly easy. She was the response to the Covenant, and what that meant implicated so much.

"The two of them are getting along just fine now. They're both quiet, the recording equipment in there is barely registering their voices. Not that they're particularly talkative. But as far as we can tell she's as much an unknown to us as she is to him. She won't talk about the Spartan Program even to him."

They'd never seen a soldier like her before: a shadow cast over her darker than the blackest unknowns, heavier than the weight of the stars. Every morsel, every ounce, every breath she took had radiated with the ability to kill. It was only because of his training did Ryder even be able to weather it all himself and how she made him unwittingly clench his jaw. She was a solution to an unthinkable question: the answer to genocide.

"They way that JD talks about her, about, them," Cleft-Lip was uncomfortable. "It's something more than bodies and battles. And, from what we've seen of his cam footage, she's impressive, but it's not all of it."

"Don't talk about their capabilities. Talk about them and their allegiances. You saw how they wanted so badly the Covenant dead. Maybe Mai wanted them dead personally a little too much, but still both of them, they wanted them dead for our sake."

That was one of the questions of the hour. If the Covenant hadn't been busy recovering from planetfall, would they stand to cause destruction amongst them? Or did they deserve help? Even if they'd killed their own, scared and afraid contrary to what Six and JD said?

The helmet footage said otherwise but it was always in the back of their heads.

There was a several century difference, but surely, the technology they had was all relative. They still used guns with casings and bullets after all, whatever that meant.

Anderson had a spark in his eye. "They're loyal however, their initial response to us says as much… would they be to us?"

"Slow down there." Ryder was quick to say, but the ship captain had hardly slowed down.

"Give them to me, I can handle them. It won't do them any good if we keep them under wraps. They might get suspicious, think they're gonna be imprisoned for the rest of their lives just for being in the wrong place in the wrong time, or Hell, even used as a science experiment."

Ryder looked disapproving. "Still building the crew for the Normandy?"

"Mission's important. Once we settle them in, I don't see where else they could go but the service. I know that Spartan, she's definitely not fit for civilian life.

Anderson had agreed, unknowingly, with ONI. She wasn't a person. _**She was a machine to be used. **_If pressed he wouldn't say that about her. He wouldn't anyone, but it was what he subconsciously thought. It's what they all thought.

The UNSC, the Alliance, the Colonies, Humanity in both universes. It was only the Covenant that had given her the graciousness to be something that was alive.

"Anyone can be made an ally. Just gotta talk to them. See what they want." Anderson remembered what brought him there. He wasn't that different from Ryder he like to think, just with a better conscious. To be out among the stars, and to defend those that came out there. "Everybody wants a mission."

The omni-tool on Sunglasses' arm had rung. With one understanding nod the two men in black had risen and looked to Hackett. Sunglasses and Cleft-Lip had raised up in salute to all in presence. "Admiral Hackett," Cleft-Lip regarded the video wall. "We'll be seeing you shortly."

Sunglasses adjusted his sunglasses, looking over the two Commanders with them. "Good luck on what you'll decide to do with the Spartan and Private Durante." They had slid out as slick as they slid in. Not a name given, only a goal. They had been assigned the case of First Contact with the Covenant and the two humans. Just two men. Still no one doubted them.

Despite this the two Commanders were charged with deciding recommendations on what to do with the two humans.

"Gentlemen," Hackett remained, but made to leave and get back to matters at hand. "You want my recommendation, give them some time, and go through as much observation and analysis as you can on this matter. Anderson I know the Eden Prime Situation is coming up, and Ryder I know you're technically free of your duty come next Wednesday, but you men have hands on with everything and so I defer judgement on them to you. Is that understood."

Ryder held his own head in his hands, tipping his head. Anderson had been more vocal. "Understood Admiral."

"Good. Hackett out."

They were two Commanders given a mission, both of them among the first N7s. Worthy to make a decision, but unsure of each other. They could be cordial however, and there much discussion to be made before they could leave that room.


	4. 0-4: Sins

"It's not something I'm telling anyone, JD, and I think I've told you enough for now."

"Fair enough."

She had shared what she had done as a Spartan, and that was the most that she had shared with anyone that didn't have the clearance.

"Some of the colonies I gave them are because of that… they weren't lost to the Covenant. At least, not initially."

"I was always advised that the Insurrection had been brought in line to at least they weren't hurting the war effort." JD had aired out his sage shirt, the burn beneath it had still stung when the fabric touched upon it.

"Do you believe that Spartans never actually die?"

The ODST pursed his lips. They were only human.

The colony locations that Mai had given the Alliance as a sampler had been colonies near Altis, or, at least, along the Attican Traverse as they understood it. She knew the locations well because she had been deployed to those worlds, and given that the astronomy was still correct, those planets would still be there. The reason being that as the UNSC rule faltered over the outer colonies as the Covenant moved in and they were beaten back, some of the colonies had flatly just faded away from UNSC jurisdiction. That was when Mai had been tasked to move in and kill any Insurrectionist groups would use this newfound independence to attack the UNSC. JD had been disturbed, clearly, at the thought that the Insurrectionists had gone to such lengths. By 2552 at least, the once 800 colony spread of the UEG had dwindled down to 200 that had been firmly in their grasp, that number going down week by week as the Covenant invaded.

To imagine that even fellow man still fought, it had caused JD a moment of anger that had been the first real emotion Mai had seen from him.

"You get used to it, you know." For the brief moment of confusion and anger that JD had on his face, Mai was able to read it. "To betray mankind in this war."

She'd spent more time silencing Insurrectionists than Covenant, at least, statistically. Any day she could kill Covenant was a good day, but Insurrectionists came with the job. Whereas the rest of her Spartan comrades had gone off to die underneath plasma fire and Assault Carriers, she was chosen specifically because she knew how to fight men and women who flew the flag against Earth. What that meant was that the Spartans, save her, were mostly clean in their service records.

JD only breathed a solemn breath and shook his head as he sat on that table, back against the cold glass separating him from space. The urge to close his eyes and sleep came, but the conversation with Six- no, Mai, had kept him grounded.

It's not that he was always tired, but he knew how to shut off on command, though this time in particular had tired him so.

Mai on the other hand, she hadn't been affected by tiredness or sleep. She just seemed bored, worried, calculating as she sat on the edge of the bed. Her fingers, still covered by her undersuit, kept gracing over the fabric.

He figured if she had it as any good as him on UNSC ships (which is to say, he hadn't had it good), she had probably slept on hard cots and terrible mattresses for the entirety of her existence.

Was she born into the Spartan Program? Could he have become a Spartan? Questions that prodded at JD so much, it had only been becoming more and more apparent that he had been dealing with something he understood even less than the Covenant.

"You keep looking at me like that." JD had been staring, if only because he had lost himself in his own mind. He had shook his head as fast as he could, mouthing an apology. "It's fine. It's not often you'd get to see… one of us like this."

He'd never operated with Spartans before, but he heard the stories from other ODSTs.

"Why'd you take off your armor?" He asked, concerned.

Her eyes had opened in clarity for a moment, surprised.

"How do you know that my armor can detonate?" She asked back, catching JD with knowledge he shouldn't have already have.

JD looked behind his back, to the space and the stars and the missions of years gone by. He answered first. "Few years ago, I was tasked with S&D of highly sensitive materials during an Op on a planet that was in the processing of being glassed. I thought it was a captain's neural lace or some highly sensitive intel that the Covenant could find. An ONI Spook who wore a helmet a little like yours tagged along on that drop."

"It wasn't intel, was it?"

JD shook his head. "Crate of armor, like yours."

Mai heard enough. The ONI Agents who were attached or had knowledge of the Spartan Program's inner workings often acted in support, and she could imagine some had the detonation codes for the armor failsafes.

"Not all Spartans wear that armor." As a Spartan III she was supposed to have donned an SPI originally. She was given the special treatment however, and it showed in her bones.

"Don't they?"

"Not all Spartans are equal." She drifted off, her eyes becoming distant as she remembered JD's original question. "I didn't activate the failsafe because I didn't see a need. We didn't ident them as Insurrectionists and they were more interested in cataloging and observing than researching it seemed, as if they've never seen something like me or it up close."

It had gone against every censor in ONI procedure to even hint at that: that not every Spartan had been the same. The IIIs were still classified, even to Halsey up until Noble Team had straight up been introduced to her point blank during the Sword Base defense. It was a fact that JD had tuned into too fast, and she was surprised at his intuition.

"What kind of Spartan are you? Are you not like the Chief?"

Mai had looked to the faucet, with a motion of her head JD had moved over, his own head tilted, asking if she needed anything. She had joined him. It was the closest they'd been with her out of armor, but there was a reason as they stood in front of the sink. Water turned on, and her head brought near the level as if she was going to drink from it.

They were well aware that there were bugs in that room. Couldn't prove it, couldn't see it, but they knew this apartment was meant for diplomats and politicians. If humanity had been the same as it was, it would've simply meant that there were still intelligence services going on.

This was how they supplanted it: the sound of rushing water.

JD recognized the trick. Drug dealers all the time used to sit by the fountains and artificial pools in order to not be listened in on.

What that meant now was that they were almost cheek to cheek, leaning over the faucet, loud enough.

She smelt like death and he wasn't much better. Her first words were interrupted as her tongue hit the tooth that the Elite had kicked loose. It was fine, this was her fourth tooth in that socket, spit into her hand and into her hoodie's pocket. JD wasn't that put off by it. Living with Marines had been more obtuse.

Finally, she started, washing her hands with that same running water.

"I'm not… like the Master Chief." JD looked at her confused. "I'm only about half his age and I've been active not that long."

"I thought all the Spartans were decorated combat veterans, brothers and sisters in arms long before they donned the armor?"

UNSC propaganda, same as most subject matters related to the Spartans.

"Different versions, different classes. I'm the newest…" She bit her chapped lips, feeling blood from the socket fill into her mouth before she swallowed. Her thoughts wandered as she remembered her own digging into information, talking with ONI agents who would entertain her between missions. "I might've been the last Spartan trained, and that was eight years ago."

She knew that more IIIs like her were being trained, and she knew the time that it took, but even with Ambrose, Kurt-051...

JD tilted his head at her to respond.

She wouldn't as her face tightened, her jaw clenched.

The chime to the door was heard as the two snapped around.

A pizza had been delivered to their room. Authentic as they come as far as JD could tell just by smell alone, Mai more confused as to what a pizza smelled like, she had never been exposed to one. Who had come had been a little more surprising.

"Normally delivering pizza is something that I left behind in medical school, but in this instance, I feel that it is warranted." The English voice of a woman who cared for those that did not exactly care for themselves, flanked with two pizza boxes and a familiar blue armored soldier: Alenko.

JD had flicked the faucet off as he saw Six harden before them, her stance going rigid. The two had made themselves right at home, plopping the two pizza boxes down on the coffee table of the room across from the kitchenette.

"Now according to my estimates it's been about a day since you two have last eaten, and only now I believe we've neglected to feed you, and I know the human body can go only so long without eating."

Technically it'd been about four days since Mai had eaten something at Carter's request, Jorge not so subtly implying that he'd force feed her if she refused. For JD he had forgotten. Perhaps it had been two drops ago when he had shoved some calorie bar into his face.

The two had been off put by the pair showing up with food, blankly staring, unsure of what to do.

Chakwas already had her plan of action, a piece of pie in her hand and just shy of taking a bite.

"It's up to you if you want to eat. It'd just be a shame for a pizza to go cold."

* * *

It's not that Shaw was, at all, xenophobic. He hadn't any ill-will against the Turians, nor any true hatred of the Batarians that went past the entire Hegemony having an outright hatred of anyone that hadn't four eyes (no more, no less). In fact, his name had been on a list that Ambassador Udina had put together in regards to military attaches to the Citadel. The fact that every Turian ship that had been allowed in Alliance space and a handful from the other Council races had crowded themselves over Altis didn't help his sentiment however.

The debris field pertaining to this "UNSC" as understood by Shaw had been covertly taken by the Alliance ships able, and, failing that, had been exposed to Shaw's two brightest engineers and their ideas:

"_What if we attach several Kodiaks to the underside of that thing and control its descent away from the action. That way we get it out of sight and preserve what we can."_

Shaw had heard crazier things, and as far as they could tell, the Salarians hadn't picked up their ploy as it was pulled off. That being said the Salarian ship hadn't been a known STG asset to Alliance intelligence.

"Send my regards to Engineer Adams and Donnelly." He had echoed into his comms as Object Charlie, the so called "UNSC Savannah" had been dropped to a part of the planet no one had been looking at and currently being dissected through by them (albeit slightly underwater).

The rest of the Alliance Fifth Fleet had jumped in to join Hackett, and, somewhere along the way, it had become the largest gathering of Alliance and Turian ships in the same relative "airspace" since the First Contact War. The comparison was made early by the Turian Admiral who had taken hold of the Turian personnel and ships not directly connected with the Council Task Force, and, oddly enough, he saw it as a sign of the trust between Humanity and the Turians. This time, fairly enough, they weren't going at it. Still the Turians were just short of bombarding Object Alpha back to the stone age.

"Respectfully General Tailus, the last time Turians ships opened fire during a First Contact scenario, you had a war. I'd advise you to stand down any idea of opening fire on them." Hackett had been on the open comms yelling at the commanding Turian officer, who of course would not have anyone fire upon his men without equal return.

"We've been abiding by your ROE for the entire duration of this situation Admiral Hackett, and despite this we have very sporadic still going on as those aliens continue to recover their strength. We need to land and show them that we will not be pushed around like this. First impressions are what count after all."

"They have to be _**alive**_ in order for those impressions to last."

Shaw was fine with having Hackett brawl it out verbally with the Turians, at least with the Salarians and Asari they had been less on a war path and more in the interrogation mood.

"_This is the SUS Havasai to SSV Perugia."_ The comms tung out again for Shaw, and it had been the fourth time that hour. He knew who it had been.

"Go ahead Havasai, and again, we're not allowed to fork over our telemetry for our engines. I know that you would have no ill will in acquiring this information, but I'd like my engines to stay under the military secrets category."

"_Ah. Had thought that maybe circumstances have changed. Will not keep you any longer Captain Shaw."_

Shaw had smirked to his XO in her seat next to him. "Salarians are always persistent, aren't they?" he smirked. His XO could only breath tiredly. While he had been up in the bridge she had been running up and down the decks making sure damage control had been in order, and she was quite frankly, beat.

"Anything for them to know, of course. Get an upper hand on an unknown." She slouched into her chair. Tired, though far from out. This was all very exciting. "Unfortunately, what's being fed back to us from Arcturus doesn't seem to corroborate that these first contacts are in our sphere of influence."

"These "first contacts" have a name, you know." Shaw had rattled off. He had learned the name without the two VIP debriefs from Arcturus from a "Lieutenant Gul" and "Private Durante". The prisoners, in between making threats, had name dropped the same organization that they were a part of that threatened to burn humanity as a scourge against the universe: The Covenant.

His XO adjusted her cap. "Eh. Sounds a little too menacing, you get me sir?"

"Of course." The console in his arm rest had been still feeding details about ground operations as far as Alliance Marines were concerned, and controlling the area and making sure that no one had made a move was still their prerogative. Survivors had been plucked from the sea: the dead arranged neatly in Altis's main convention center, while the survivors were kept in containment in their fish market. 450 survivors and counting, and soon enough containment cells would have to be out in the streets that were still being cleaned up.

"Marine teams are reporting the last of these aliens have been forced out of Fishing Port Derry, which means any colonist made property and land has been cleared of them." One of the comm officers reported triumphantly.

No one wanted to state the fact that this felt a little like open war, but no real counter attack had come from the Covenant, almost as if they were allowing such actions to take place. It wasn't as if the Alliance had come in and wiped them. Hardly. Many of those locations that had been cleared were given up as transports ferried those away in a fighting retreat. Anyone left behind had been too injured to travel or had a death wish.

For that the Alliance had its casualties, but there was restraint shown. Maybe it was because it was to be expected that every first contact had its casualties that everyone held themselves back, and as the Council ships deployed their own forces and caught the tail end of that combat, they were wise to do so.

The effort of those who had attacked them spelled warfare and tactics that could only come with veterans and training.

"Secure positions." Shaw said once. "Keep blasting our diplomatic message, we know that they can hear it. This is a staring match I'd rather not give up on."

"Aye sir."

* * *

Usze Tahamee couldn't believe his eyes. He had been up and down the front with the humans, been everywhere in the name of warfare in the expanses of the Covenant Empire, and what he had seen that day from beyond the glass of his cell spelled revelations that would've changed the very nature of the war. Sure, he had known of the Covenant Fringe species, of the Yonhet and the Talkaki among them. Species which the Covenant had come across but judged them, in every matter, insignificant to warrant full integration. They were subjects alone, but that at least meant that they were known.

A full day had passed since he had been in captivity, and he and his Sangheili brethren had refused to speak or even regard the humans that had kept him and the rest of his comrades locked in. The Brutes had behaved similarly, save for the occasional swipe at one of them whenever they were attempted to be talked to by the humans. As far as Usze could tell, none of the Prophets had been captured, and the Mgalekgolo had been far beyond anything they could contain. In fact, only the frontline force species had been captured: and the Yanme'e had been, given their ability to take flight, able to escape themselves if they were in combat.

That left only the Unggoy, and the Kig-yar.

He would've been upset that they had talked, and, when he got back to the ship, he would kill one out of every ten Unggoy as an example.

The issue had been who the Unggoy talked to after the humans:

At first he could stomach Blue Humans… until they got close to the cell that is and saw the leathery tentacles that ridged the back of their heads. They looked into the cells, speaking across with the humans in a language that they'd never heard before. The humans had responded naturally, and both parties understood as those Blues looked at them back with wide eyes. At the very least, maybe a genetic subset of humans unseen by the Covenant until this point. That's what Usze rationalized as he calmed his more erratic brothers from thinking.

"The humans are unholy, surely other alien species would see this."

Apparently not. Not when shortly after the Blues had come by and looked, aliens outfitted for battle came by to look them at them all the same. As if they were on display. No. It was a two way exhibit now as even the Brutes stayed their wrath and incessant ruffling, and looked and saw a very new, distinctly alien species walk them by shoulder to shoulder with the Blues and the Humans.

Their heads were scaled with plates, talons on their hands very similar to the Sangheili's, their mandibles moving in a very familiar way as they conversed. The sounds from their mouths were like that of birds, flanging from what they could hear as some of them still in their cells were taken out and marched off. A carapace had been below their greyed skin neck, eyes dug into their skulls, beady like, a crest and fringe sleeking back their heads.

"Birds." One of Usze's cellmates said. "I recognize their facial features as that from raptors and other birds of prey."

"How do you know?" Usze asked silently. The Elite had been sitting on the bench provided.

"I was a hunter once."

"Hmph."

The small talk couldn't prevent or stave off the impressions that swept them all of their understandings of the human race. There had been a new species and it had floored all who saw. To see them work in relative concert with the Humans had been… troubling. Had the humans created a Covenant of their own when no one had been looking?

The last to come around had been another bipedal species that had, oddly, been similar to the Sangheili. It was only a trick of the fact that their skin seemed of the same texture, and therefore, the same ancestral background in terms of ecological development: amphibians of some sort. Their large eyes placed near the top of their bodies that seemed stretched too thin, fingers padded like-

"Frogs." The Hunter commented again lowly.

Their eyes had been the most intruding, big and black, prodding at them. Doing what they could not yet do with their hands and instruments.

Again, they had spoken in complete amity and cooperation with the humans.

What had happened without them knowing? Had the Prophets not known of the human's alliance with these new aliens? Something had been wrong before that however. The ships that they had seen above which had been carrying humans were still vastly different, and the arms and armor they saw before them hadn't matched any known human makeup.

"Human splinter faction perhaps? I doubt a species who has been at war with us for so long would have any trust in any other species." The Hunter had spoken aloud the thoughts that Usze would not allow himself to bear. The scar that formed on his face scabbed over, and what had once burned now had numbed. A thin line: the mark of a demon.

It was by that mark he was identified as a procession of that group of human-aligned aliens came to in front of his cell.

For a moment, he wondered what had happened to the Demon and her Imp a day earlier. He had thought that they simply were reintegrated into human forces after being "saved". Though he had replayed the events of the past day in his head. They were treated no differently than he, and even in the known human splinter groups a Demon was often engaged on sight, not captured or handled as the one that had made that mark on his face.

One of the avian-like aliens had moved his hand to open the sliding door to their cell, and the eight Elites in them, Usze included, had all stood ready to do anything to make a break for it. Before that however he had pointed out to Usze alone. The Blue alien with them had nodded, and all at once everyone but him had been either floored or sent against the wall as her hands flamed with a warping fire.

Before the Spec Ops Commando had known what to do, looking to his brethren in awe of this telekinesis, the door had opened, and a talon reached out to him and dragged him out.

They were all dressed as scientist as far as Usze could tell bar the Avian, the metallic suit he wore not unlike his own combat harness which had been seized from him much like his sword.

"Don't hurt him. The Unggoy say that he's the only one with any significant rank." The human that had accompanied this group had spoke. Usze had understood the human language. Enough of it to know what was being said down onto him as he was dropped on the floor at gun point in front of the cell, his Elite brothers having been let go from their unseen grip, banging at the cell door.

On his knees, he was ashamed. "How dare you subject me to this incessant demeaning, human, would you not just end my life before I end yours?"

The avian alien with a rifle aimed down at him had spoken shrill nonsense, but the human had looked at it and nodded his head, fully understanding.

"We have no idea why they hate us this much." The human said as the Blue alien had an orange tool on her arm going, wave forms seen in its transparent display. She spoke to him something more identifiable as some sort of human speech, however still Usze couldn't make heads or tails as the human affirmed again. "Look here, just keep talking to me in my language and we can clear up any hostilities as fast as we can. We don't mean to do this but you don't seem to want to cooperate."

"Cooperate?" Usze had laughed as he sat on his knees, looking up at those aliens. They all smelled so different, so unknown. "You would have me communicate with you in a language that does not end in your death, or mine?" His arm had twitched, and he had tried to make a move to raise his arm up to take the man's neck in his own hands, but the avian shook his head, barking at him.

"I don't want to kill you." The human said. "None of us do."

The avian sneered at this, however the frog had been silent the entire time, his own data pad rolling through lines of information. It wasn't a feeling Usze had appreciated, to be on his knees as nothing but an animal to be observed. He was a proud Elite warrior, an Ascetic who had upheld Sangheili tradition in the Covenant! The Frog had, perhaps, seen this misgiving, looking over to the Blue, its mouth curved into a pucker.

Blue nodded, her orange tool around her arm ceasing activity. It emanated from a metallic strap that wrapped around her forearm, unrolled as her hands went to blue fire again, Usze frozen solid in his own body. When the Blue had touched upon him he would've lashed out had he not been locked in his own skull, but she had, wrapping that armband around his wrist and then down and activating it again. He thought it would burn his arm off, but it didn't. From what he could see from his peripheral it had been a screen: a personal assistant or device that he had been recently educated to use as an officer.

"That should do it." Blue had said.

She said. That was one of the more immediate facts that Usze was exposed to as she backed off and the tool dissipated into thin air, leaving nothing but its presumed emitter on his right arm. A translator? He thought.

"The Humans right, Sangheili, I'd rather not put a round in the back of you if you resist, so please don't." It was the same flanging tone of the Avian, but spoken in Human tongue.

"Human language good stop gap. Nearly a dozen individual languages to translate soon. Still, curious as to circumstances of human language being known by every species here to extent." A high voice, too fast, rushed.

When the grip on him had been let go he had immediately stood up as those around him had backed off. All around them had been more and more of their type: and still watching had been those in the glass containment cells, their faces shoved against the doors to see Usze, for once in his life, be stayed into silence and reflection as he fought his body to bite back at everyone around him. His own feet stepped him back to cell he had just left, back to the glass.

"Protective of others. Assuming defensive stance. Reasonable suspicion that this one is indeed a leader." The Frog was the one that had been speaking, Usze haven't been able to see while frozen. "Can understand, yes?"

Usze gave no answer as he had squared his feet, his hands closing into the Sangheili equivalent of a fist. "He's a fighter." The Avian spoke again, rifle held at his hip, dead at Usze. "Aren't you? I see it in your eyes, you've been places haven't you?"

"I've gone to war far beyond your comprehension, do not test me Bird."

The Avian looked to the Blue somewhat apathetically. "Is our heritage really that apparent?"

Frog had spoke before she could quip back. "So it-… He does understand. Male correct? Any other biographical details you can provide?"

It was heresy to even speak to Humans, however the Hierarchs had never said anything about the menagerie before him.

He narrowed his eyes, voice growled through a throat worn from yelling and roaring. "What are you? Why do you stand by as these Humans take us prisoner?"

The Frog had dressed in a white and red, metallic coat, a device along the back of its neck there for some unknown purpose. Whereas the other Frogs had rather symmetrical cranial horns, this one had one cut short. Scars had been on his cream-colored face evident of combat, a scar not unlike his own worn on his cheek. He pointed at the Blue alien, then the Avian, than at himself.

"Asari, Turian, Salarian. Species name, in that order." His webbed palm had been held on his chest, indicated himself again. "My name is Mordin Solus. Professor. Lucky enough to have been in transit with Council ship when alerted to situation here."

"Wha...?"

"Lucky to meet you. Knows human language. Not obscene thought that also have knowledge of human customs. No intended harm otherwise if gesture is offensive. Handshake."

A hand out from the Salarian was prompt.

This wasn't how First Contact was supposed to be. A lot more screens, a lot more mutual objects of identifying, stumbling over language barriers, caution and weary.

Though this was how it was. Any pretense of the unknown cast asides: just an awkward middle ground that had to get over or else more had to die. The only problem with that was that one side wanted more to die.

"Not shaking." Professor Solus said aloud, Usze still wary. "Suggests noticed amiability and cooperation with human species not good in view."

His hand was pulled back, and Usze had spoken lowly still. "Do you not know who we are?"

Professor Solus shook his head once. "As is why many questions to be asked. For our safety, _and that of your men_. Will. You. Cooperate?"

A threat. Plain as day. Or rather, not a threat, but a suggestion. That much Usze could tell as he laxed his form. No harm wanted to be done to him, and he had answers they needed. To rationalize or communicate with the enemy was heresy, but slowly it dawned on them, they hadn't been the enemy. At least, not one he had known.

What choice did he have anyway? Naked as the day we was hatched, a gun pointed at him.

He slacked his form and Professor Solus smiled. "Logical at least. Not like Rachni. Good."

At the corner of Usze's vision, a shift in the light, a slithering line that only he caught in that fishy smelling market, hidden by both the run of water and the occupation of those who would be otherwise looking for any abnormalities. It ran across the ceiling, and, as if telegraphing its presence only to him, had stopped for a fleeting second before moving on to an open vent.

* * *

The Jiralhanae had a name which both the Humans and the Covenant agreed on: Brutes. Forty at a time they would send Jiralhanae clans into the breech, and forty more after that, and forty more after that. The blood of Brutes had watered the tree of the Covenant, and, for some, that was nothing more than their destiny. Even a technologically superior empire needed its cannon fodder, and, for as useful as the Unggoy were, the Brutes at least could do some real damage.

Usage of that forty at a time tactic had of course, halted. As for why the Covenant leadership would never state why, but the Brute Clans had been far more connected than any of the Prophets or Elites would suspect. When Atriox had emerged from those suicide missions three years ago with his clan, he had arisen by providing the Covenant the war that was retribution for all the blood spilled by those that the Covenant had seen dispensable. It was an inner war, a guerilla war, which had caused great concern among the inner Covenant territory where Atriox led his 'banished'. For three years thousands have joined his crusade and taken the attention of the Covenant away from humanity.

Mercaius had often considered finding Atriox.

To join him, or to kill him, he wouldn't know.

As a Brute he had craved the challenge, the combat. War was his birthright and thus he had entered this war to kill. His blue power armor was as battle worn as it had been for a reason. For all his rage, he knew when to keep it canned, to keep it held back. There were two beasts inside of him, constantly fighting, one an animal, and one an enlightened being due to the Covenant. Whoever had won mostly was the one he had fed the most.

"What ship was this brother?" One of his comrades had said in their husky breaths as beasts.

They were in a Phantom that had been dispatched by the Shipmistress in order to survey any of the debris that had landed in their operational range. There was more that had fallen outside of it, but that had risked butting heads with the humans. The fact that these humans, this "Systems Alliance" hadn't opened fire on them spoke more to the peculiarity of this situation. All that meant that they had been able to fly and not get shot at for once.

Corvette size to them. Frigate size to the humans. It floated, as no damage was done to it during the slipspace event or the time before. They didn't know, wouldn't know, but Operation Uppercut had no intention of damaging this ship.

"Ardent Prayer." Mercaius said. His voice had been deeper than most, prone to making the glass around him, seemingly, vibrate. His fingers held tightly a long hammer, energized on the face that enemies were expected to be smashed upon. He was only a Captain Ultra, and yet he had been given that Gravity Hammer, bestowed upon him by Tartarus himself. Not as a weapon of reward however. It was a weapon of grief.

Forty at a time, the Covenant had sent his clan. Mercaius was spared by pure chance, and for that, he was made chief of his clan. Not out of skill, our tenacity, but because he had been the last one.

He rectified that by battles won and lost since then.

Ardent Prayer, in the morning light, was as graceful as any Covenant ship. Though its fine lines was not what made it so alluring. What made it so alluring was the fact it was intact, battered surely, but intact. Far more than the Solace at this point.

Several other Phantoms and Spirits had descened on it, however his own had stayed over orbit in the light of the morning.

The night that followed landfall had been tense, nonstop activity from adjusting defensive positions to be set up on top of the Solace to on the surface of the waters had been tumultuous, but needed. The Brute Chieftains of A Long Night of Solace had been deployed on the surface of Reach, laying siege to some fortress or another planetside, all raring to fight. With them had been most of the Brute leadership also trying to gain their distinctions. When Solace had been attacked and robbed of itself, brought to this watery world, the highest ranking Brute of the million and then some population of Jiralhanae had been the Decanus: Mercauis. To the Sangheili's military understanding, he was a Captain Ultra. To the dire situation of Solace, it meant he was now heir to Chieftain across the many clans within her berths.

His first act had been to hold them all back in their fits of rage and confusion, despite the appearance of humans.

Brutes would kill for themselves gladly, whether or not it was a blood worth spilling was another, so he had gone into the Brute habitat of the Solace and spoken aloud the promise of a great battle to come, and now, simply, was simply their time to bide and to build and to pay respect to the Covenant and what that meant in their situation.

What had impressed Shipmistress Karonee as the Section Chiefs were gathered for the first time before they were given their orders, was that Mercaius had given these orders on his own instead of the Sangheili or the Hierarchs pressing down on him.

"_You are tempered for your pack, Decanus."_

"_When witnessing your clan get sacrificed into a battle, an inch at a time, it lends perspective Shipmistress."_

With that Karonee had trusted him enough to deploy him with a force to a location of an important planetfall.

Now he had still shown that temperament. "Sir, the Kig-Yar want to pick apart what's usable above water. They say the ship will sink eventually and it is best to simply scavenge what they can." He heard in his ear from the Battlenet."

Mercaius snorted roughly behind his helmet, his eyes red, but not fiery at that moment. "Tell them I would fry and feast on every single one of them if do so. This is not another wreck for them to plunder."

"Yes Decanus." Even his subordinates had a hint of fear from his threat and orders. He was okay with that as he regarded his Gravity Hammer. He had only used it to kill against insubordinate Grunts and Jackals, and it had wanted, much like his people, a fight. Today would not be that day if he could help it, thumbing the radio in his helmet to the command frequency.

"Shipmistress, this is Decanus Mercaius. I have a report on the Ardent Prayer."

* * *

"Shipmistress, this is Decanus Mercaius. I have a report on the Ardent Prayer."

"Very good Mercaius. Please secure the ship and make arrangements for it to be secured and brought back into the fold." Karonee had said in her floating captain's chair. One had been recovered during all the commotion, and only settling into it had made her feel just a momentary relief of normalcy.

Still in that tilted bridge Shipmistress Karonee, she had been awake for more than 24 hours, landfall having taken the Solace down almost that long ago. She could weather it however, all Sangheili in command had once been through far worse: especially one who had been a Fleetmaster such as her. She'd missed the old days, the old assignments, that had required her to put her foot on ground and ignite her long unused energy sword. She looked upon them with fondness: from days when the war with the humans had been simple, and they hadn't yet adapted to their type of warfare. Nowadays the victories against the humans had been great of course but getting to be increasingly costly. The victory over that human planet of Reach was to be her greatest yet in support of A Long Night of Solace. How brilliant it had been: to cloak one of the largest vessels in all of the Covenant and land it on one of humanity's fortress worlds. Yet the humans had been capable of brilliance themselves.

Supreme Commander Thel Vadamee had warned the Shipmaster of Solace, Supreme Commander Barutamee, to stay his assault until the Fleet of Particular Justice had arrived. Unfortunately, Thel Vadamee never came in time for the humans to pull off some sort of devilry that destroyed the Solace over Reach. Barutamee was lost with the frontal sections of the ship, and the only Shipmistress left, the only individual that would be able to exert complete command of all those millions of survivors, was Seylu Karonee.

Quite frankly she loved the challenge, not so much the fact that she had been getting reports of several hundred survivors getting rounded up by the humans.

"They entered orbit a few hours after we landed, their ship designs do not match this "System Alliance" or any documented by our computers."

"And yet they've been working in concert with this alliance all the same."

Of the 300 or so section heads and leaders that A Long Night of Solace had embarked with to invade Reach, only 13 had remained, and they had all occupied the bridge after being found and recovered, in a circle around the Captain's platform in the secondary bridge. Most Sangheili, a Unggoy Deacon, and two Kig-Yar rounding out the affair. The only representative missing had been the Decanus that Karonee had spoken to: Mercaius. Right now, they had been the command staff, and what that meant was that they were severely unprepared for the situation as presented to them. Contingencies had been in place for lines of successions and the order of command, surely, but the Solace was still in as much chaos as when the slipspace event that had whisked them away had started. Only now was any work being done to get the ship back in order, as best they could when partially submerged and facing off against the unknown.

The two Kig-Yar that had been present had their arms crossed and glaring at the proverbial round table they were at. "Never seen these designs." One of them had said. "My Scavenger groups have brought back much of this human tech on planet."

Diagrams of the captured human tech had been displayed on consoles that the Section Chiefs could see: weapons, armor, equipment, and the bodies that used them. All humans.

The Sangheili Surgeon General, in charge of medical facilities on the ship, had thumbed over one such photo of a body. The Elite had only one arm, which had relegated him to support roles, however his skill with the blade in battle had translated well into medicine. "One of these humans we put down before we acquired his corpse, he combatted us with… unusual abilities."

"Unusual?" Karonee asked.

The Surgeon General nodded. "From his form he was able to manipulate objects without direct physical contact. Now as the Kig-Yar once assumed, the human was using some sort of matter manipulator, similar to levitation devices used to send cargo across this very ship's corridors. However upon further biopsies his physiology was… different. Chemically different."

"How so?" Karonee urged on.

One of the Section Chiefs had been one of the Bridge Crew that had been on site when Usze showed up: he was one of the appointed Engineering staff and translators for the Huragok. Said Huragok had still been overhead them all, floating, sending its tendrils into the electronics of the bridge and repairing what it could. He continued for the Surgeon General. "Earlier it was observed that these "System Alliance" ships were giving off anomalous readings that our sensors were unable to identify. We still haven't been able to ascertain the nature of these readings save that it is highly correlated to readings of object mass. Those same readings were detected here in at least one body recovered."

"In all of the human bodies we recovered?"

The Surgeon General picked up again. "No, only one. And that body had additional implants. More then we see with typical soldiers of the humans… even then," he was cautious. "We know it is near heresy to study the humans as close as I personally have, but albeit, I have seen their heads bashed open on occasion, and most of the soldiers of humanity have chips near the base of their skulls used for identification on their motion sensors. These soldiers did not."

Then it was settled. These soldiers were not of the UNSC, not even of their splinter groups. Their gear alone, the fact that none of their equipment transcribed had matched any of their databases had only solidified this point.

One of the Kig-Yar had scratched with its throat, gaining attention again. Its attire had spoken toward one of the raiding groups that operated out of the Solace, pirates, if nothing else. "What's strange is that, from the data we've recovered, this planet is well behind our current frontlines. If nothing else, we made it past this planet nearly two years ago."

The Section Chiefs erupted in murmurs.

_"Did we miss a colony?"_

_"Nonsense. You know how it goes, when one planet falls siege we follow the trails left by those that have escaped, and eventually all the refugees lead us to that sector's bastion."_

The two Kig-Yar were closely connected. While one had been the Chief of Raiding Parties, the other had been the ship's cartographer. The Kig-Yar were noted adventurers alone, and often tread paths that the Covenant only now walked too. Both didn't work out of pure charity however.

The Kig-Yar's relationship with the Covenant was that they were indeed a part of it, but not for the same reasons as the Elites or the Brutes. There were finances behind it: money and scratch. The two had conspired with each other on it, Karonee knew. "Normally, shipmistress," the Pirate asked. "Our arrangement with Supreme Commander Barutamee was my groups would be paid for any salvage they came across from the UNSC."

"I don't see why you would think I would deviate from this arrangement." She had shrewdly said, not wanting to be bothered by such arrangements at the moment.

"Then I think then, it should be of note that much of what we're coming across makes no reference to the UNSC or any entity that we know of within the humans civilization."

"What do you mean no reference?" One of the Sangheili Section Chiefs asked, a finger up.

"Logos, typefaces, typical human procedure and warnings. None of that. Even the farthest flung colonies have some hint of standardization."

Even that blasted message from the "Admiral Hackett" that was still being broadcasted all lead credence to the idea that these were not the humans they were used to dealing with. The Kig-Yar went on: dates didn't line up, organizations, formatting of data pads and clothing, norms and products seen elsewhere not present.

"And, most of all, I'd like to be recognized as the one who coordinated the search who-"

"Out with it Kig-Yar, you will have your pay." For a Grunt, the Deacon who had been assigned to Solace's Hydroponics had been feisty.

The Kig-Yar Cartographer had sniffled once at the Unggoy, but carefully considered his words as he went to one of the free consoles. "Of all the information we were able to collect from any technology or data holding devices we came across, we have now the location of a planet that has eluded our Covenant for this entire war."

There was only one planet that the Covenant ever looked for that belonged to the humans. The Covenant looked for planets, yes, but those imbued with Forerunner heritage and secrets. They searched all the galaxy and then some for the temples of their Gods, spoken through the Prophets. Vaults, Shield Worlds, artifacts that were all the greatest of existence save for the sum that had been the Halos.

And yet the Covenant searched for one human planet that every human had called their own: Earth.

"This is the human homeworld. This is _**Earth**_, and we have its location now."

And on the holographic projector in that secondary bridge, a blue and green jewel of a world was displayed alongside exact coordinates, just left of Antares. A goal, a hidden world, that if sieged would've ended that Crusade.

Humanity's greatest secret now laid bare: _**its homeworld**_.

They all marveled at it. The pause that gave them all was befitting. In the hundreds of human world that they had laid siege to, every single one had been carefully purged of the information of where the human homeworld was. Every single one, a protocol was followed by the UNSC to make sure the Covenant would not find their home. Thousands of men, sometimes a million, had sacrificed their lives to make sure that secret was kept for nearly thirty years.

Now they had found it.

More specifically, a Kig-Yar Scavenger before it had evacuated back to the operating range of the Solace, had picked up a digitized brochure that had advertised Earth as a tourist destination.

No torture, no questioning, no pain or death. This was how the Covenant had found Earth: by a fluke.

_"We need to get this information back to High Charity immediately! We could end this war tomorrow!" _One of the Sangheili Section Commanders had screamed from his knees, in jubilation and anxiousness.

_"We should send this information off into space, every probe left we have, broadcasting its location as far as we can. Surely one of our recon pickets or comm buoys will be able to pick it up."_

Karonee had stared at that world in all of its beauty and grace. It looked like a world the humans would call home, often the most protected of their planets were those that had qualities similar to Earth, and, for a moment, she too was imbued with information she felt was integral to the Great Journey. That her place in it was secured and made holy. She had realized however, that she did indeed have this information, and that was wrong as the voices of her crew faded out, her inner monologue arguing, considering, wondering why that it was she.

The humans would've given up entire worlds to preserve this information, and yet here… surely, they had guns aimed at them from space, those ships above, if they had known, if they were UNSC, would've laid waste to them all admittedly.

Here, they hadn't raised one finger. Hadn't given one damn save keeping them occupied and contained in that space of ocean and reef.

This was Earth, and yet another secret had been revealed to her then.

In what world would the humans let this information up so easily?

Not the one she had come from.

She looked back to the view screens of the ships above from the System Alliance, and then to those that showed their shuttles and activities at that distant city. It was a possibility so distant, and yet it breathed down her neck. She felt alone all at once as she saw the stars above, coming over her like a chill from the planets covered in ice and snow, a wind shearing over her skin and letting her know that, in all the universe, she was not welcome.

The fundamentals of slipspace travel and slipspace usage… It was the same across both Human and Covenant techniques, and what that meant was, perhaps…

"Shipmistress." A robotic voice, the AI of the Solace. Truncated yes, but its processing power had been self-healing. It appeared to her alone silently at the projector of her arm rest as the Section Leaders had still been enthralled by the knowledge of Earth.

"Speak, computer."

"One of our Mgalekgolo pairs is reporting from outside of our operation bounds."

She tilted her head confused. Usually the Hunters didn't speak to even her. Moreso was the fact that they had been speaking from beyond the operational range of Solace and her forces.

"How?"

"This particular collective saw fit to fit their individuals within our hardened cargo stores during the ship's fall, and they were thrown from the crash far, now in the human city." Past that she didn't need much more of an explanation. The Lekgolo had been, asides from the Huragok, among the best at coopting technology. It wasn't outside of reason to think that some of them had been able to avoid detection and jury rig a way to signal Solace and the Shipmaster.

"Are they safe? What is their intention?" She asked in a hushed voice.

The AI flickered, waiting for a response from said Mgalekgolo.

"Observation until otherwise ordered. Information already gathered speaks to several unidentified species working in concert with humans while they process our captured forces."

_What? The humans have found allies? _Her thoughts had brought her to think tactically, now aware of the claims that forces had been captured. In that moment of revelation she had humored herself. Perhaps the actions of those humans, if they truly didn't know who they were, were just felt by her as the reports of more unknown species came to her.

"Shipmistress, how say you?" The Sangheili from the ship's internal security division had asked, bringing her out of her thoughts. She regarded the AI again before she gave herself back to the discussion.

"Keep in contact with the Lekgolo, but make sure they keep themselves hidden." She had grunted, clearing her voice. There was always a tone of voice that she brought to command, perhaps emulating the male Shipmasters in order to get her point across. In a patriarchal society that had been the Covenant there would always be those who sneered at her being a Fleetmaster instead of a wife of one, though she had proven herself time and time again. "The discovery of the Human homeworld is of utmost importance, perhaps just as important as the discovery of our gods' artifact beneath the surface of their fortress world we were just previously in orbit of, however my concern is keeping whatever is left of this ship and her complement in standing order and effectiveness."

"So we should proceed as if we do not have the Human homeworld's location?" The Brute Bodygaurd standing in for Decanus had protested, blood thirst in his voice.

"That data does no good to us if we cannot survive past today, tomorrow, or however long it takes us to get back to space." Karonee bit back. "But I fear our situation is more complicated than that."

"Then please, do say."

The hum of another grav chair had entered the room and all inside had taken notice, turning over. One hundred thousand. That was how many of the Solace's population was dedicated to the San'Shyuum: the holy prophets of the Covenant. Ministers and Hierarchs, professors and clergymen of the Great Journey. That's what they were. On a ship as large and significant as the Solace, there had been Prophets among them. None of the High Prophets of that Age, they were all on High Charity, however there was a place surely for the Prophet of Destiny.

He was of a younger sort, around the same age as Regret, without his arrogance, but with portions of Truth within him. There was a certain air about him that had come with being a Prophet, if not the defacto High Prophet of A Long Night of Solace.

He wore the red robes of the Prophets, not a crown, but a wreath of green on his head. Whether they had been gems carved close enough to be leaves, or leaves that never wilted, no one knew, but they added a particular vision of Destiny that none of the other Prophets had.

Accompanying him had been one of his personal guards, backed by the red and orange clad Elites that had been his Honor Guard. The personal guard however was a rare sort: a San'Shyuum, stood at full erectness, an armor over his skin that painted him as a stick figure made weaponized. A Prelate: one of the few San'Shyuum dedicated to warfare, genetically modified and equipped to go toe to toe with even the best of the Brutes or Elites. A weaponized staff had been in the Prelate's hand, his face covered by a helmet with one visor that hadn't shown what was beneath.

When he entered the room the entire complement had taken a knee.

"Hierarch." They all addressed, even Karonee as she left her own grav chair and knelt down, head down.

No one had looked up until ordered, time enough for Destiny in his own chair to float over to Karonee. It was by his touch that she had looked up to see the face of a Prophet look at her with a certain want that betrayed everything that she was.

Destiny graced his long fingers onto Karonee: two had lain on the back of her neck, the last: the front of it, sneaking up to the side of her face. She could only hide her revulsion and disgust by staying rigid, holding her breath.

It had been an open secret that the Prophet of Destiny had fancied Karonee.

Matters of inter-species relations at such an intimate level were a taboo within the Covenant, but, much like the illegal markets run in High Charity by the Jackals, or the feasting on Grunts by the Brutes, it had happened. Then again Karonee couldn't otherwise protest in that regards, she had once lain a Brute Chieftain to make him fall in line.

It was once remarked by a human that everything was about sex, except sex. Sex was about power. And the power dynamic of the Sangheili and the San'Shyuum was seen in that moment between Karonee and Destiny. No one had protested, and save for one or two of the Sangheili who had respected the Shipmistress far more than a Prophet, no one cared. He was Prophet after all.

He had brought her to her limit just before he pulled his hand away and floated back to the other side of the bridge.

"Rise." And the bridge staff and the Section Chiefs did. "What were you to say, Shipmistress?"

She was very well a devout believer of the Great Journey, attended sermons held by the other Prophets as well as any Elite. She could've been a Zealot herself given her faith. Though what she was about to propose… she wasn't quite sure if she was being heretical to even suggest. Still there were worse things to be blasphemous about.

"The humans, through their devilry have dragged us to a place unknown _**to both of us**_."

* * *

Slipspace, as a concept and scientific theory, had been both more fully understood by the Covenant, while also misunderstood. Their slipspace drives had been derived from the technology of the Forerunners, and what little derivative research that there had been had been imbued with holy incantations and underlying beliefs.

It was a combination of believing that humanity had been trying to drag them to Hell, but failing to do so, that had been something that most of them had in some factor were able to believe. As was the danger of Slipspace travel.

This wasn't to say that it was easy news to take.

"So that would truly mean that the humanity here is not one we've encountered before, and one that has not yet encountered us?" The Brute Bodygaurd had wondered aloud.

The explanation made sense. "Yes." Karonee had gone on. If only the astrometrics were up she'd check the stars themselves for proof. "So, if that were true, our circumstances, the Covenant itself… maybe even the Great Journey-"

A loud cough had come from Destiny. He had taken the news plain-faced. No reaction until now, as he knew what Karonee was to say.

"The Great Journey is regardless of circumstance. The Great Beyond? The same no matter where we are…" Heaven was an idea. Perhaps an idea more true than the Covenant, he mused privately. "Surely our duties to the Great Journey are still as assured. We owe it to our forebearers to never stray."

A muddled wave of agreements from the Section Chiefs, even Karonee, albeit mutedly.

"What is the Covenant but to spread the word of Salvation?" The Grunt Deacon shrewdly ass kissed. "Now we have the ability to spread it over realities!"

The difference of reaction between the Covenant and the Demon and Imp wasn't in their manner of belief. Far from it. There was safety in numbers, and the Covenant Empire survived to the tune of several million individuals that had been transported in the Solace. Families and clans, entire bloodlines and heritages. That was the promise of space travel either way; those that had opted to travel aboard the Solace knew that home was the Solace: not a planet or system. Even when it was fallen and destroyed, their home, their people, were still with them.

Not so for the two humans that had come over with them.

"Are we alone then?" The Surgeon General asked. "Will I never see Sangheilios or High Charity again if this is the case?"

Karonee tightened her mandibles at how solemn he sounded. "This is all conjecture, but it is one that we must proceed with until we can verify otherwise, and what that means is that the humans above… Prophet?" She opened up to the San'Shyuum, drawing off her point, hoping that the seed could grown and each of the Section Chiefs could realize themselves.

Destiny started slowly. "I do believe it would be useful for us to establish a greater… context of where we are right now and who we are dealing with." No one had any complaints. No one would. There was something he was building up to however. "And if these humans are not of the sort we know… then their existence isn't heretical to the Great Journey."

"You would mean to reach out?" The Kig-Yar asked together. Their kind was not unfamiliar with the concept. Even those around, Elite and Brute, hadn't, considering the circumstances. For all the pain that they've caused to, and been caused from, humans, the blood lust after thirty years did not come without some respect. They themselves were not brainless hordes, and if the Prophet had implied that it hadn't been heretical to respond…

The AI of the ship had picked up again to Karonee's comm. "Say what you will computer."

Instead of the AI's voice however, came the voice of one of many missing in action upon landfall.

"_A Long Night of Solace, this is First Lieutenant Usze Tahamee. Does the Shipmistress hear me?"_

Karonee had snapped to address it just on impulse, the rest of the bridge crew silent as they awaited an update.

"What is your status First Lieutenant? What happened?"

"I do not have time, but I am fine. Please triangulate my position based on this transmission." Karonee had nodded to one of the bridge officers to start the process. "I was captured and held under observation with great deal of men, however we have been treated fair… that might change however.

"What do you mean?"

A pause, a strained silence as Usze took a breath, commotion on the other end.

"If you want us to survive, Shipmistress, you need to display strength, but do not attack. Show the humans as always have what we can do, and know that you should do this as if this is the first time they've known of us." The transmission was dropped. A short message, a message from deep behind enemy lines that spoke toward the same unease that they all felt when dealing with these humans. Her fingers had wrapped around the front of her face as she felt the headache come and go, determination rising up in its stead.

"Your holiness." Destiny had been awaiting. "What is the Covenant protocol for first contact with another species?"

The Prophet had considered for a moment, hand at his chin and neck. It'd been a long time since the last time an alien race was incorporated, however that wasn't Karonee's aim here. Her aim here was just a guideline for response. "It's on a case by case basis, shipmistress."

_**Be decisive. Be resolute. Commit.**_ Words from an Arbiter long ago, whose blood she carried within her.

She would do so.

"Open up communications. Wide band. Let the humans know that we are coming."

An inkling of nostalgia came by her. Could she repeat those famous first words again? Of being divine instruments to purge a vile cancer? No, she thought. That would only be retreading steps already taken.

"Yes Shipmistress!"

She had pointed directly at the Well Deck Chief. "Do we have enough transports to deliver Scarabs?"

"We have enough to transport an entire armored platoon."

The sword on her hipped burned her flesh to be held, and so she had abided a thirst she had not quenched in a decade. "Prepare it for deployment. Full complement. Arrange for combat operations in accordance to a typical city siege" She looked toward Usze's Elites, the Spec Ops operators. They were ready. "You men, you're with me. Gather yourselves and my _**Zealots**_ if they still survive on this ship. If they demand a first impression, _**they shall have it!**_"

* * *

The reason why Usze had been able to hail A Long Night of Solace was due to this:

"I bear no shame, walking exposed. To walk without the armor on top would only want me to desire it more."

Usze had been allowed his under suit back as he had been politely escorted to the office section of that fish market, he was still intently aware that he had done so at gun point, but the human scientist that walked besides him, she was not scared or fearful in any aspect. He had known what fear was when seen through the humans, he had caused so much fear himself that he had known that when a human did not fear him, they were either dead already or a warrior worth his steel.

For all of them there, there was no fear.

It was worrying.

As he had donned clothing himself again he was led through to the towering Aquasola building, other, lesser Covenant species being handled by the herd back and forth between it and the fish market. His appearance didn't inspire any less fear in them however as they all trembled beneath his gaze. It meant that they did something wrong and they knew it.

"I see the Grunts and Jackals have tried to save their skins." He muttered scornfully.

"Hardly." Professor Solus had still been toying with his data pad, his fingers fast on its inputs. "No offer of clemency or safety was assured, but talked anyway. "Grunts" and "Jackals" inherently possess… less fortitude than yourself?"

Usze flared his nostrils in a facial move that was the Sangheili equivalent or a reluctant nod.

"They call your kind the "Elites". Isn't that right?" The Turian with the gun was out of view, behind them, obviously still with the rifle ready.

"For good reason." Usze growled back.

It had been mostly human soldiers running up and down those streets with the occasional other alien along with them, speaking amongst each other in the morning light for another long day ahead. Usze recognized the talk as organized chaos: orders being given and arrangements being had. In the sky: more shuttles had appeared, but more varied in design. All around them both alien and human alike had gave a good look at Usze and his escort walk him to the sky scraper, without binds, some had been liable to think that something big was happening.

Usze, given his position, also had to think so as well. No hint as to what was happening, no intention made abundantly clear.

"Who are you." He finally asked as the morning tropical breeze blew the smell of salt down those streets made less for vehicles but pedestrians: apparently the main form of vehicular transportation had been more flying car and shuttle than wheeled vehicle. Understandable given Altis's nature as an oceanic planet.

Even the main colony's island hadn't been much bigger than Hawaii back on Earth, debris still lousy in the streets; mostly sand and oceanic refuse such as seaweed and the local fauna.

The human scientist looked and nodded at the Blue human.

"We are the Council." The "Asari" had said. Her voice was soothing, matrilineal almost. "A governing body of space farcing civilizations who have come together as sovereign governments, but underneath the pretense of a cooperative sphere of oversight and association." She said once, all those around her agreeing with nods or curt agreements.

"And you would have dominion over the Orion Arm?" Usze asked as he looked up into the sky, faintly, in the clouds, he had seen a cruiser hover just barely in atmosphere in the less than ideal lighting.

"Hm? Hardly. We have access to most of the galaxy via the Mass Relays."

Usze's mandibles had tightened once, then spread. The tell-tale sign that a Sangheili was in deep thought. If they had been throughout most of the galaxy, then how had the Covenant not come across them?

"Unfamiliar?" Professor Solus had stopped just before entering the building, underneath the shade of the foyer, it brought the entire group to a stop. Usze shook his head in a negative.

"The _**Covenant **_is the only thing I recognize."

"Covenant. Interesting nomenclature. Religious connotations suggest that multiple species have aligned under faith." Solus had said to himself, almost as an aside. Usze had been able to hear it however.

"What's your aim?" He asked.

Mordin smiled wide and large, no teeth shown, just as Sangheili preferred coincidentally. "Purely scientific."

Usze had shuffled his mandibles. Had it been so easy to believe that. "Your hands, your face, professor." He stared out into the sky, the color so familiar to his home. "Are those scars from scientific interests of yours?"

"Perhaps. Does it matter to you?'

"The shadow of your intent hovers over me, and it does not make me well."

"Reasonable to have suspicion, will not put it past you. But know, in this instance, my interest is purely scientific. Days of espionage over."

"A spy who announced he is a spy?"

"Am not spying now, am I?"

"Professor please." The Asari spoke. "Understand that we wish not scientific study of you, but cooperation."

Usze's mandibles twitched. "And you would have us locked in cages to do so?"

The Asari cringed. "The Alliance response is often straightforward in their intent, but understand that fighting has broken out where we believe that could've been avoided. The Council would like to let you know that we apologize on behalf of the Human Race-"

The human scientist had coughed into her hand. She had been otherwise intensely eyeing up Usze and how he walked, noting down muscle movements and gait. "You're a scientist. Not a diplomat. Let's leave that to the actual Council."

"Best to get what we can before politicking happens. Don't you agree?" Professor Solus abided around. Even the Turian grunted in agreement as they continued into the building. "Do you happen to know of your chemical chirality? Great struggle has been in determining so as food and supplements can be delivered to others."

Usze tilted his head in surprise as the air conditioning of the building kicked in. That he recognized from many human buildings he had broken into. Humans were creatures of comfort. Comfort was also something that apparently the humans and this Council were trying to afford to the contained such as him. "You would feed us?"

"Not prisoner." Solus had sternly reminded. "So do you?"

Usze shook his head, scornful he couldn't understand the "chemical chirality" if it meant he couldn't provide sustenance to those men he had just left.

The tower hadn't been military he could tell, more civilian than anything co-opted for the events happening on that planet: led into an elevator.

For as long as the elevator ride up was, the scientists had chattered among themselves. Usze, despite being a Sangheili, had ridden more than enough human elevators in his day to notice the discrepancy in speed. Even the smallest things had driven him off to the point that something was wrong.

The elevator doors opened, and it revealed to them more quaint business spaces and the wide horizon. What had caught Usze's eye the most about that view in the morning was that the Solace was clearly visible in the background. It gave him pause, knowing that it was still there, dots of activity over it clearly being Phantoms and Spirits assisting in the relief efforts. No visible fighting he could see.

"Ah yes, had a question." The Salarian was ever incessant with his questioning. "How does a ship of that nature sustain space flight? No Element Zero found on any debris or on sensor scanning of both construct out there and anything related to you."

Usze had looked at the professor as if he was mad. Why would he need to explain to a professor how a ship propels itself through space? It was all the same principle, even across the Covenant species before the Covenant had formed. Even the Humans had similar methods of spaceflight.

"Don't know?" Solus prodded. For now, Usze had shook his head no. "I see. Just follow then. The sooner this is over with, the sooner true cooperation and collaboration can begin."

They had walked him into a conference room: another video screen on the wall and someone Usze had immediately identified as a human shipmaster was on screen. A tired and greyed face, it reminded him of some of the older Elites he had known.

Dress Blues, as the humans called them. That's what he stood in as Usze was presented.

No introductions needed. Not that it mattered.

"Up front, we just want you to know the reason we have you here is because we'd like to have you reach out back to your people."

Usze had been quiet as the human had rattled out his words.

Admiral Hackett recognized the silence. It was the same sort put out by Mai.

"What has happened since your ship has made planetfall is regrettable indeed, born out of misunderstanding, but we hope you can forgive us as we have forgiven you." He went on. Still Usze had been in silence. "May we have your name at least? From you?"

Usze had glared at the screen of the human. He had seen UNSC Captains before, officers. He'd been intensively briefed on what they looked so as they could be targeted first, and this one showed no such identifying features.

"Usze Tahamee."

An alien name indeed. Hackett nodded in recognition.

"Usze Tahamee. What is your rank?"

"Lieutenant." He answered. The full title was technically: _First Lieutenant Major of Coming Shadow, 1__st__ Division. _That was not pertinent however, and he would speak as little as he could to these humans.

Again Hackett nodded his head, arms behind his back. "According to what information we've been given by who we have alongside you, you are therefore the highest ranked among your military structure present." He paused as Usze took that fact in, looking out the window toward the Solace. "Are you the captain of that ship?"

"No."

"Then we'd like for you to reach out, and to get us in contact with who is. As you must understand hostilities have occurred, and we believe this is just a mistake."

"Are you human?" Usze asked pointedly.

"Yes." Hackett answered.

"Then we have not made a mistake. Our war shall continue against the human race-"

The Admiral sucked in air as he looked to those that accompanied Usze. "If I may have the room please. Five minutes." His interruption had stunned Usze, and even the scientists there, but they abided as they made their way out. Solus had lingered, turning back around wearily, however he had left and the door locked. The room had been an executive meeting room, and the walls were very much thick enough for secrets.

"We're not your Human Race, Lieutenant Usze Tahamee."

Usze raised his head up and tilted, as if he had dog ears, perked.

"What do you mean, human."

It was a story that had to be told to several million individuals if they hadn't found out for themselves. Whether it had been through the Prophet of Destiny, Shipmistress Karonee, Admiral Hackett or any number of people who had the full story, it always was the same:

_In an act of desperation, the UNSC used a Slipspace accident and weaponized it. The consequence of that was it didn't destroy you, but rather, it displaced you away from not only the planet Reach, but from a reality you would call your own._

_It is the only explanation any of us have._

_The war you fought is behind you._

_The Systems Alliance is not your enemy._

_You are a long way from home, and the chances of getting back near is a statistical improbability._

"Let us help you."

Usze had stood there, fists closed, the gravity that took down the Solace now upon his shoulders it felt. Was there a reason why he had been fighting humanity? Yes. The Covenant demanded it. The Hierarchs ordered it. The humans had been blasphemous in their existence against their gods. Not only that, but how many of his comrades had he seen lost or cut down by the human devilry?

Too many.

He had returned that debt in blood and bone: in planets he had seen glassed only after he and his comrades had cut their bloody swath through it. Though he had, once, told himself to not think of his enemy like that. He was an Ascetic after all. It meant that when he thought of war and conflict in the broad sense, he was fighting for that bigger picture. Sangheili ancient philosophy on war spoke of honor in combat to the highest degree, and to never hold personal wrath against an enemy just for being an enemy. This, perhaps, was lost as the Sangheili came into the Covenant and waged the war against humanity.

This was what he thought of now.

_**Why**_ had he been fighting humanity?

_Because I am good at it._

The thought was a fact and yet… why did it bother him as a flea did?

"You do not know the pain of the Covenant?"

Hackett had gotten the report from JD and Mai. He had seen the pain of a presumed lost, genocidal, galactic war in their eyes. He had seen what it had made humans into. Now he stood and spoke to a soldier who had caused that pain and contributed to the death of _**a**_ human race. In another world, Hackett like to imagine, he would be holding this alien in court martial, holding him responsible for the crimes of going to war against humanity. The Admiral's aged eyes burned the image of the screen on his end into his memory. An Elite, looking out to the wreckage of a warship whose secrets and capabilities would mean that, if it had come through in its entirety, might've spelled the end of galactic peace:

_ **A monument to all their sins.** _

If the war was truly lost, as JD had said, then the Covenant must've been that to them; Mankind's reckoning at hand.

"I do not know that pain. I do not wish that pain… and, I do not hold you or your people in contempt for your actions in another reality."

It burned him to say that, but at the of the day that was a pragmatic choice and answer. He could not morally, ethically, hold them accountable. Mai and JD might've wanted otherwise, and Mai would've waged her own war as she so very much wanted in her bones, but they were fish out of water. They were lost in the cosmic sea, in another ocean, in another planet. That's how far they were gone now.

The rules had to change. _**They**_ had to change.

"I wish…" Usze had, like a whisper, spoke. "I wish to inform my Shipmistress on these developments."

"We will start as soon as we can."

Usze's gaze again was drawn to the Solace, the sun rising behind it, painting it like a artificial mountain raised out of the sea: a monster from an unknowable deep.

"You will not fight us?" It was easier to fight when it was mindless, when an eye for an eye was the way it went.

"Not if we can help it. Alliance and Council."

A crash, a bang, Usze had squared his feet and raised his hands. It was Professor Solus, barging through the door. "Assistance needed in containment center!"

Usze had been alarmed. "Have we broken out?" he didn't even know why he would ask his captors.

Captain Shaw's voice broke through the comms in background to Hackett's video call. _"Do not engage! I repeat do not engage! If anyone fires there's I'll book them myself into the brig!"_

Usze felt no hesitation to run with Professor Solus back to the fish markets, and what he had been found was the nightmare of many UNSC service members.

* * *

The Council and the Alliance had only been able to capture a handful of those species that had made up the Covenant. For some, like the San'Shyuum, it was a matter that they hadn't been frontline species. For others, like the Huragok, they had been busy back on the Solace. The case of the Mgalekgolo, it was simply that they were unable to be contained.

The Hunters were encountered by the first responder Marines, and the second that they had opened up with their huge ordnance allotted to them, no attempt was made to directly combat them or piss them off otherwise. They had been encountered in their signature armor configuration: as in, the Lekgolo had been Mgalekgolo. It was the only way that the first responders knew them as, not being able to yet identify them as actually colonies of worm like species that had construed into a bipedal being.

It was that element of surprise that made two particular colonies of Lekgolo ride a Covenant military coffin down during the Solace's descent, wash up on the Altis Colony's beach, and slither into the city before the Alliance and Council even began to arrange for their response.

They had been a particularly big colony: enough to have split into two and become bonded whenever they were in their Mgalekgolo form. On a planet that had been alien, with itself several exotic and alien forms of fish, if they had been seen out of the corner of an observer's eyes they were written off. That's why they were given free reign to slither like an eldritch mass into buildings and look upon, from vents and badly lit corners, what had been happening to those Covenant that had been captured.

The Lekgolo had not been a simplistic hivemind. Far from it. They each had the intelligence of full sapience, even in a hiveminded form, and eventually, after much snooping about, had gathered necessary electronics for a radio and had got into contact with A Long Night of Solace.

"The Shipmistress advises you to remain covert and in communication. " Said the Solace AI.

"We will." Their voice was one that was fake. As in, being a mass of worms they hadn't the ability to articulate via usual means, however enough maneuvering and vibrating would be able to suffice to form words in the Sangheili tongue.

The pair had found refuge in a waterlogged dock; ruined by the waves that had come from the Solace hitting planetside, it provided the two colonies of Lekgolo refuge as they gathered what they could from among the debris: the only way to enter being collapsed pathways and doors in the structure that could only be used by worms.

Shipmistress Karonee had hoped that her orders had been able to translate to "stay put". The Lekgolo were nothing but pioneering in their own way as one of the two mass of them had swallowed their makeshift radio device into themselves.

They were deep behind enemy lines, but not without recourse. Not when in that dock they had uncovered the equivalent of mechanized loaders.

Once, long ago, to ward off intruders, to ward off the Covenant in fact, they worms had often just coalesced around boulders and rocks to become giants and titans, whacking away and decimating the unprepared. Nowadays they had been more resourceful for that, several millennia of eating Forerunner machinery to blame for that, however it meant that before long they had their options.

They had a deference for darkness, both that it kept them cool, and it allowed them to scurry across to the fish markets where the rest of the Covenant captured were being held. The Lekgolo hadn't been out of context. They knew what had been going on. They knew of the Systems Alliance and the Council from people speaking way too loud, or just from simple eavesdropping. The revelation that they might've ended up in another reality was taken simply by the hive minds. If it made sense, it made sense. Even with that knowledge they didn't see it fit for their fellow Covenant to be held in cells. Piece by piece the worms had carried the so called "YMIR" mechs up to the roof of the fish market.

When they came across the Mass Effect cores of the two mechs, both of them fitted for security duty along the docks by the wildlife authorities, the Lekgolo had been generally confused. The purpose of it, without explanation, and taken out of the machine, was not inherently clear to them. It had radiated power, that much was certain, but it radiated with a certain sense of unknown that took even the tech savvy race by surprise.

Like the radio it was ingested in their mass, swallowed whole as they made their intentions with the mechs: broken down on the roof in the cover of morning light.

Slithering where wires would be, putting away with struts and beams meant to otherwise imitate organic movement, the Lekgolo had come in from the inside out: heads of the mech discarded as their arm mounted guns were co-opted. Circuitry replaced, a shell made of a machine. Wood boards that had been otherwise debris was stuck into the backs of those shells, and anyone who had known what a Hunter looked like would see the similarities: orange worms exposed where muscles would be had the YMIR been alive.

The roof of the fish market had been a few stories high, allowing the market below to be open air with its exposed roof. For the Mgalekgolo, it only meant that they did not need to break through.

In combat verticality had killed, but it was not natural for soldiers to inherently scan up as much as they did horizontally. Arranged like rows of products at a supermarket, the containment cells have been so as well, at least twelve wide and six deep, the pattern for the stalls for fishermen the guide for the arrangement.

The Hunters had no intent to kill, not with the information that had been coming to them, but they were armored up for a reason as they jumped in.

The Alliance Marines and Turian guards on station in the containment center had thought another piece of debris had made planetfall right dead center of the building, the scientists and otherwise other civilian observers all panicking the moment the loud bang and crash was heard.

Only when glass started breaking did the soldiers hit the safeties on their rifles and ran for where the sound was heard: dust getting kicked out and the sound of Covenant screaming through.

Without a modicum of sleight the Hunters had hit the ground, indenting their landing: steel cracking and the cells around them sliding in because of the crater they made. The occupants had also panicked for a moment up until they heard the telltale growling.

It was only followed by the smashing of their cells, freeing them.

Hunter met Hunter when the Mgalekgolo appeared in front of Usze's former cell, the Elite Hunter that had conversed with him ready to be freed as the fist of the Hunter broke glass.

Brute, Hunter, Elite, Grunt, Jackal, all had taken to freeing each other as the guards struggled to respond. When the first soldiers had run up to arms reach of them the YSMR-clad Mgalekgolo had told them why that was a bad idea.

To see a human thrown, albeit non-lethally, across the wide mart to the front of it was a sight to see: as if a gorilla had been let loose, though the connotation had been much, much more hostile.

The Hunters screamed togethers, fists made of metal slammed into the ground, but not attacking, marking its territory.

_ **"What do we do?!"** _

_ **"Shoot it?!"** _

_ **"Shoot it!"** _

The Alliance Marines and the Turians had raised their rifles at the crowd, outnumbered hopelessly as civilians ran behind them. Bellowing out likewise the Brutes had been enraged, however just as one got on all fours and started to pounce like an ape one of the Hunters had reached out and slammed it back in line.

A divide seemingly a hundred miles wide was opened up, just by the presence of the Hunters alone as they corralled both sides into submission.

The Brutes had their bare hands ready, Grunts running amok as if their hair on fire, only adding to the chaos as Jackals found pieces of glass to hold and to throw while the frames of steel were held like staffs by the Sangheili.

"Captain Shaw we've got a containment breach!"

Visual feed from the helmets had been beamed up immediately to the Perugia as Shaw had been inundated with reports coming from frantic Marines moving into the fish markets and setting up firing positions.

"_Do not engage! I repeat do not engage! If anyone fires there's I'll book them myself into the brig!"_

The former hunter of an Elite had picked up a piece of frame, angled at its end almost like a spear. He had used such an instrument to hunt many aquatic prey during this youth, making his shoulders and arms strong and accurate. Perhaps that was the reason why he had been issued a Fuel Rod Gun. He had picked it up as the riot formed around him, calmly feeling it in his hands as he looked over to the other side of the market: a giant mass of men and women who would do him harm.

Perhaps, with his arm, he could…

He had walked forward, pushing through, piece of steel in his hands and held.

It was a massacre held back by regulation and implication alone. A shot heard around the galaxy could've been let off then and there and every rifleman there knew that. Lives had been taken on both sides already, but the situation here was different: a line between prisoners and the wardens. The Alliance and the Council wouldn't fault them for wanting to break out, wouldn't fault them in being angry, but the line was dynamic and they didn't know when it could be crossed.

_"What do we do?!"_

_"Stand back or I'll shoot!"_

"_**It would be unwise for you to do that.**_" Out from the firing line of Marines come through an Elite that all those there had recognized. Even in a ship a million strong, the appointment of a Spec Ops officer who had been groomed by Rtas Vadumee was a big deal. He had made his way between that distance, meeting the Hunters half way.

With what had counted as their head they had nodded at him, and from their inner guts a radio had been handed over.

"First Lieutenant." They said. "Speak to the Shipmistress."

Out from their folds of exposed flesh and worm, the radio set had come out again, the rudimentary receiver pointed out and handed to him by worms acting as appendages. Slimy, but usable.

"Speak." They said again, urging him as he took the receiver in his hand fashioned out of tubing he couldn't make heads or tails of.

"A Long Night of Solace, this is First Lieutenant Usze Tahamee. Does the Shipmistress hear me?"

_"What is your status First Lieutenant? What happened?"_

Without pause he had heard the Shipmistress response, distress in her voice directed at him.

He wondered if he would've been looked down upon for being captured, even if it had been in the process of fighting a Demon. Those were thoughts he could meditate elsewhere he decided as the troopers of both humanity and the Council races began to be alarmed that he was talking.

"I do not have time, but I am fine. Please triangulate my position based on this transmission." There had been no protocols on contacting leadership after escaping and evading capture. As in, the protocol was to not get captured or die trying. "I was captured and held under observation with great deal of men, however we have been treated fair… that might change however."

_"What do you mean?" _She sounded confused. Who wouldn't be.

"Is that our Shipmistress First Lieutenant?" Usze heard the voice of the Elite Hunter, hopeful in his tone. He nodded at him warmly. "Then so the humans haven't blasted the wreck of the Solace in our absence… what is going on?"

_"It means that they want to capture the Solace as intact as possible!"_

_"Nonsense! Why would they be treating us like this then? The humans know us! They would've shot us in the back as soon as they got their hands on us!"_

"These humans, brothers, they are not like the ones we know." Usze had spat out at his fellow captured. "There is far more in play than we could ever imagine. We need to be willing to cooperate in this instance, for all of our sakes."

_"They would have us be like rats in a lab and you would agree to this?!" _A Brute yelled out. _"You are a traitor! The humans and their allies are deceiving you!"_

"They hold us like this, Brute, because they do not know what we are! Would you have them think of us like vermin? Give them a reason to attack? Lay down your aggressions before your body is used for their science!" Usze had curled his fist in the general direction of that dissenting voice, murmuring of confusion and dissent abound that even the guards could tell as internal strife.

There was, as they say, a conflict in every heart, between the rational and the irrational. A war brewed inside the heart of the Elite Hunter. Was it rational for him to just stand there, weapon in his hand and not use it when an entity that looked very much like his enemy stood across from him? Or was it irrational to act even with, for the first time in his life as a soldier, a doubt.

Usze was no heretic, just by who he was alone. No Spec Ops Elite was as such without unwavering faith. He trusted him then. The hunter didn't trust himself however. Every kill he had taken in the name of the hunt was always cut and dry, positive in what he was doing. That even translated, that feeling, to when he had gone to war against the humans. This was the first time in his life that he hesitated to fight. But maybe that was just the seeds of heresy being formed within him, able to easily be blocked out if he raised his arms and threw that spear till it found flesh.

Then the fighting would start again and everything would be so simple.

So why hadn't he thrown his spear then? If what he had known was right about the humans was so, and he had killed a great many in his day, why hadn't he been dead in this state? There was only one answer that could've been used in its broadest sense: circumstances had changed.

The metal frame dropped to the ground, unkindly ringing the sound out throughout the market. "We are not rats, Brute. I think that is the _**only thing**_ we need to prove. I will stand down." That rebar was thrown down to the ground. "The First Lieutenant knows what he is doing."

To see an Elite throw down his arms was a sight. Sangheili code never shown positively on stepping down from a fight. Though Usze knew where the Hunter was coming from: To have blood spilled was not the goal of Sangheili Warriors. The matter of how it is spilled and whether or not it was worth it made all the difference. It gave a calming effect to all sides, and, one by one, Elites had done the same with whatever they had fashioned as a weapon in that brief moment.

The humans and the other aliens didn't let up, but the tension was softening as metal and stone clattered on the ground.

"If you want us to survive, Shipmistress, you need to display strength, but do not attack. Show the humans as always have what we can do, and know that you should do this as if this is the first time they've known of us."

* * *

In the fish market, those inside couldn't see the horror that had come upon those outside as Object Alpha had exploded with mites: dots erupting from it, only to approach the city like a swarm of pests.

Clouds and clouds of inbound contacts: not a force anyone there had expected to see come forth, unable to stop them as they came and flew over the colony, the hum of their engines roaring in the sky as contrails were drawn.

A swarm of those aliens' transports had hovered above the city, and before anyone could do anything: a mass of them had tethered four massive constructs. Walkers, four legs each: a mouth that glowed green. War machines in every sense of the word.

They flew higher than even the Aquasola tower, fighter aircraft rounding the city and using their maneuverability to stop out bound and inbound shuttle traffic in their tracks. Whether this city was human as they understood it, or not, the soldiers of A Long Night of Solace had known how to invade. Whether it had been Reach or Altis, Harvest or Earth, the Council and Humanity saw first hand what many had held as their last sight: the storm come to them.

To fall was something that every single soul on that planet had enough of in the last day, and now they had to whether the fall of those war machines from a height unimaginable.

The four-legged monstrosities had let loose and they flew until they hit the ground: crushing building or ground where they stood. Many unfamiliar with a Scarab had thought them destroyed in the cloud of dust they each kicked up, however the great mechanical whirring had clued them in otherwise as they all stood tall. Four of them had come, dropped in four corners of the city, dozens and dozens of shuttles dropping their own troops in their vicinity under direct orders to not fire unless fired upon.

How odd it had been, for troopers posted to defense and troops deployed for an invasion to touch ground next to each other and not do a thing about it out of orders.

A tension so tight, it burned all present like electricity to a rod. Wraiths, Ghosts, Locust, Choppers and Revenants, dropped down on the ground by other Phantoms and run through the streets like biker gangs. A text-book occupation carried out without a shot fired, and only the might of a military put on display to those who dared.

The ancient images of the Geth passed by the Council personnel's mind, the curved and elegant curvatures of their vehicles and the armor of some reminding them that, perhaps, had an alien species conquered the Geth while no one was looking? Had Rannoch been freed and usurped? The technology of the Geth was theorized to be far more advance than any Council race, so it had been a guess. The real answer was far more horrifying.

Karonee had been in the lead Scarab herself, its turrets scanning the roofs of the buildings they climbed over and through, their destination assured.

The steps of each Scarab had resounded through the city like the monsters of old: Godzilla and Kaiju from an Earth culture a century in the past when monsters became real amongst the stars.

"Shaw to Hackett, are you reading these visuals?!"

Admiral Hackett very much knew what he was looking at. Not a trace of eezo in those monsters, everything had been unknown but the Covenant's ability to fight.

This was the Covenant War that he had been warned about, and, for the first time since the First Contact War, Admiral Hackett had seen the face of genocide. It was a hint of it, a promise that it could be done, but they had the upper hand in orbit.

"This is Admiral Hackett to all Council and Fifth Fleet ships, prepare firing solutions on my mark! Designate on Altis and Object Alpha. Do not fire unless fighting begins!"

That message from Hackett had come through clearly on the Covenant battlenet, the Alliance and Council frequencies trivial to break through thanks to the Huragok.

Decanus Mercaius had returned to the bridge of the Solace and given temporary command by Karonee. To put such trust, from Sangheili to Brute, was unheard of. Still he had affirmed that trust that she had put in him by desperate circumstances. He hadn't even sat in her grav chair as the Prophet of Destiny looked over his shoulder from the back of the bridge.

"Shields up!"

For what it could, what remained of the shield array of the Solace and radiated its hull.

"Massive power readings from the Object Alpha! Looks like some sort of energy membrane around the structure." One of Hackett's tactical officers reported.

"Shields?"

As if listening to Hackett, the voice of Karonee had beamed out across the planet again via transmission.

"This is Shipmaster Seylu Karonee to all in orbit: especially for you of the Systems Alliance. We will not be looked down upon as something to study and learn from. We are heirs to the _**Mantle of Responsibility**_, and if you shall continue to continue your current actions against the Covenant, we shall have no choice but to press hostilities against you, as we have the humans for years. Cease captivity of all, let us reclaim our people, and you will not today bear witness to what it means to stand in the way of the _**Great Journey**_."

All Sangheili Shipmasters had a knack for speeches, and Seylu was no different, standing at the control center of that Scarab, her message transmitted to all listening. Through the viewscreen of the Scarab in its command center she saw how different this city truly was from the humanity she knew: the great center of the fish market dead ahead as the Scarab made its way on top of the colony's buildings.

As if they were actually talked he had immediately broadcasted a response, all the while the rest of his comm chiefs were desperately trying to get the Turians to not open fire.

"You're an unidentified force which just appeared in our territory, Shipmaster, surely you understand that precautions had to be made, especially when your kind shows open hostilities toward humans in particular." It was Hackett.

She dignified no response as the fish market got near: Spirits moving ahead of them and depositing Jackals onto the roof for sniper overwatch.

Not that they would have any time to get settled, not when Karonee personally tore down the side wall of the market. It came down as it did in a natural disaster: the two front legs controlled by the Lekgolo integrated, tearing them down just like a beast's claws through flesh. Not even the encompassing dust cloud could shield the sight of a purple machine towering over all of them: a green node threatening doom from its snout.

"_Spirits!"_

"_By the Goddess!"_

"Interesting vehicle. Multiple in deployment. Mass produced? Need for weapons easily able to take down armored fortifications suggest…" Professor Solus hadn't been phased. Salarians were not long lived and he was nearing the end of his life. He still had time to be intrigued, not to dread death. He walked fast, the Hunters that had created that entire scene originally alerted, but he paid no heed as he laid a hand on Usze's shoulders. "Not first experience like this?"

He shook his head.

Even the visual feed as Karonee saw it had picked that up. Troops within the Scarab had all roared out as they emerged onto its top deck, aiming down at anyone who hadn't been Covenant or otherwise rappelling. Over her shoulder she had given the hand signal for Usze's Special Operation Elites to go off. They had their duties.

She switched over to the command mic of that Scarab. "Transfer our captured into the Scarab, we have arms and provisions."

The mass of prisoners had quickly met with the troops that came to rescue them, replacing them in the Scarab as now it was a fair fight: gun against gun, but still with Usze, Professor Solus, and the Hunters between them both.

"First Lieutenant Tahamee. Say your status." Came from the Shipmistress's voice, booming out in Sangheili.

He had looked to the Scarab and nodded once, before turning to Mordin. "You may keep your arms, and we do not intend to capture you, but please, it'd be in your benefit to lower your stances."

Professor Solus had known the deal, his arm waved out to the guards and scientists who had picked up a gun. Not all had been so willing: the Marines and Turians.

"You give me one reason I should trust you squid." Already the insults had rolled off one of the human Marine's tongues.

_**"If we wished you dead human, it would be done so already."**_ Usze growled.

Usze was right to question Professor Solus's intentions earlier, from his scars alone he had seen battle. Training in the Salarian Special Task Group had made sure that scars were the only thing he left the battle with instead of his death. That's why he had seen the shimmer, the glimmer, of light refracting out of the corner of his eyes.

The Turian that had guarded Usze before had been a more astute one, present there, having come along with the pair of Usze and Professor Solus. The humans there, up above and on the ground, weren't the only ones who had been veterans of the First Contact War. As a combat vet, gun still trained on the general mass of the opposing side, he noticed something that Solus would not reveal. These Aliens were trained, initially seeming to just funnel all of them into a cone of fire from catwalks in that fish markets. However, that wasn't so. No one was aiming at them from the positions that actually mattered. They were there, a presence to be had, but they didn't aim.

"The hell are you doing." He whispered, scanning the area.

"What?" One of the Marines had heard him question, tunnel vision making him peer forwards through his rifle scope at those directly to his twelve.

"They're doing something." He had spun around, the spacing between each guard and Marine immaculate still. Enough to move, enough to give cover to one another if push came to shove. "They have his on three sides but they're not aiming."

"_This is Captain Shaw to "Shipmistress" Seylu Karonee. Understand that your presence is not only a biological and chemical threat to us, but also one of security."_

"It's not that we don't understand, Captain." Karonee had started. "But we refuse to be treated like this. Not when hail from an _**Empire. Not when lives have already been lost**_."

The Turian guard continued to twist around, trying to catch an unknowable something that would explain that itch in his gut and the bad feeling that manifested in the back of his throat. There were at least thirty Marines and guards having taken position at the front of the Market, several of them with launchers aimed at the giant monstrosity that continued to be unbothered by them as they loaded the prisoners.

"Lives lost because there was a misunderstanding Shipmistress. We wish, simply, to make sure there are no more misunderstandings, and we apologize if our First Contact procedures, out of caution, have transgressed against you." Hackett had said aloud on every open channel.

Soldiers were frozen like statues, aiming at each other. Only did Usze realize then he was in the crossfire if anything happened.

"Your arms down! Please!" He ordered to those newly arrived foot soldiers. The Grunts and Jackals had listened without hesitation, even the Hunters moving back a bit to appear less threatening. It was just the other Elites and Brutes that offered resistance to that. It was in their training admittedly: if a gun was being aimed at them, they would aim back. "I will not see blood drawn because of foolish aggressions!"

What Usze didn't know, deprived of his armor and suit systems, was that those that continued to aim were putting on a show, drawing presumed fire to them. The Elite Hunter knew why, his eyes seeing what Professor Solus long since, even in that short time, presumed to be. His hand had lain across Usze's back in a calming presence before he drew the lieutenant's gaze over to the humans and other aliens.

Only because Usze had used this subterfuge before did he notice it.

All that Turian guard had was a pistol, a flashlight in the other as he took it from his belt and pocket, laying pistol hand across the forearm of his left as he moved his aim off from the enemy across from them. When the flashlight had clicked on he had seen the distortions of reality in between the space between every single one of them.

Even five feet away from him.

"Spirits-!"

He didn't even finish his curse as he ran at the refraction of light, and he had found a solid being beneath him as they crashed on the floor: color filled in the shape and a gun was shoved in its jaws.

All around them, shimmers of light solidified into gold and crimson covered figures, the burn of energy swords in all of their hands. Intermingled with all the responders, the obvious size of the typical Elite, not even one of the spec ops variety, had been how for many Humans and Turians, they first experienced Covenant up close. They were that close to death and death had manifested in the gold, sometimes crimson, armor of a fully equipped Elite.

When their swords activated like a rip of flame, Carbines aimed at the heads of those too close to act, held up at gun point, the Marine that had dared ask aloud of trust knew that none of them were bluffing.

Still it didn't stop his bravado as he turned on one with a rifle: "Fuck you! Let's go!"

The golden covered Elite had slashed away at the rifle before his momentum stopped, energy bleeding through metal before his gauntlet reached out and grabbed the man by the neck, throwing him asides.

This, and every helmet connected to the tactical net of the Alliance, was transmitted.

"Firing solutions set! Turians might fire!"

"Belay them! No one fires or else we might have another war on our hand!" Hackett screamed.

Shaw had done the same, coordinating ground forces up and down the colony. "I will not let you men die because of this! Stand down!"

"They dare move in on our positions?! Your colony?! And you would not have them fought?!" The commanding Turian in charge had screamed from his ship.

"Their intent is not to fight, General! This is all posturing on their part!"

Throughout the city Covenant troops had moved to intercept, but not apprehend, Alliance and Council personnel, making themselves known and taking their own positions. A thousand soldiers: all holding each other at gun point.

This was a proper Sangheili First Contact, Karonee mused to herself. All the strength one could muster put forward. She looked out and saw one of her Elites on their back, a knee on their chest and a pistol shoved between its mouth. It had been the one the Turian had gotten a jump on, and there she had seen a warrior worth their mettle.

Not one human or alien there had wavered. No one had put their hands up or surrendered as the world stood still, waiting for the first strike, if there was one. All anyone could do was hold their breaths and await their intentions. If the Covenant had come to take this city it would've been over five minutes. Though that was not why they had been there. Not today. Not in that galaxy.

Karonee began. "Admiral Hackett. Know that we have your men by the knife's edge, their throats ready to be opened by us, and they can do nothing about that. You may fire upon us from space, that is your advantage, but know that if you do so you will never have your peace."

Hackett had muttered darkly, following her conversation. "From where do you speak, Shipmistress?"

Karonee snorted. "We speak from a place of honor, and if we shall fight, we shall at least do so another time. When you have a chance."

The Covenant's better angels had prevailed today however. They came in peace, and all that they asked was to see their leader. Their weapons were drawn down, deactivated, and the Zealots and Spec Ops operators had returned to invisibility, peeling away form those that they threatened.

"Release my crew, stand down, and then we shall… talk." Talk, diplomacy… Unfamiliar concepts of professional paths to the Sangheili. The Writ of Union had made sure that was not something the Sangheili had been expected to do. No. That was the duty of the Prophets.

And, on the Solace, that was what the Prophet of Destiny had prepared to do. He looked to his Prelate: "Send for replacements to my Honor Guard. The humans are very well known for their devilry, and if I shall speak to them and their allies, I will do it with precaution." The Prelate nodded and walked off without speaking, his orders clear. Left alone the Prophet could only sigh into his long fingers. Regret would have his head if he had even spoken to a human of any sort that hadn't been for the purpose of professing destruction. Truth would do far worse to him. Though the reality was that they had not been in the picture anymore if the Shipmistress's hypothesis was correct.

To think that they were all that were left of the Covenant Empire over some fluke… Well, he thought, there were worse ways to fall.

By the time that a Phantom had transported the Prophet to the SSV Kilimanjaro with an entire procession of guards and combat troops, word on the Extranet had been that something was happening on the borders of the Attican Traverse. By the time talks had started, that something had become history making.

* * *

One of life's great tragedies: Everyone got what they want. Those two wanted a mission.

Pen and paper, like the old world. That was how special this order was.

"Are you sure about this Anderson?" Prime Minister Shastri had seen the paper proposal put forward by Anderson and Ryder. The culmination of the tensest talks, philosophizing, and ethical dilemmas that two men could possibly take on. Anderson had taken the more humane approach: observation and assimilation. Ryder: safety and caution, still reeling from the last questionings they had.

"Me and my crew can keep them contained. They seem like good people, and if their intentions are true, they'll try their best to reorient their services."

Shastri bit the pen. "How do we know that their moral values and societal norms are the same as our own? How do we know that this UEG and UNSC wasn't some right-wing militaristic sect of humanity that took over? Are they even familiar with democracy?"

"Culturally, their human society was very much the same as ours, and their upbringings…" Anderson had drifted off, remembering when they had come from. "The years which we currently inhabit are the years that defined humanity's initial expansion into space. They recognize it well: Entire planets and colonies free to do as they will. That freedom and liberty existed for them and they still believe in it now. So that shouldn't be a question: they are moral people."

"Even the Spartan?"

Anderson grimaced in his chair. "The difference between us and them however, was that humanity was alone apparently for them. Their war has since shaped them as people. You can only understand what that has done to them."

Shastri could've as a soldier once. Still he had concerns. That was why he had the clauses already written in: If the coming trials and tests had proven them reliable assets then they would be allowed to do as Anderson intended. If, in the UNSC, those two had fought for the future of humanity, they would do the same here. For what other reason would they have?

A pen in his hands, and, for humanity's sins, he had given them their mission.

His signature had been written in that order, officiated, put into a letter and handed to Anderson. "Are you sure you want them on the crew of the Normandy?"

"Until we find somewhere better for them. I trust them."

"Why?" Shastri asked honestly, thoughtfully. "Can you really vouch for someone like that?"

The same reason that Anderson had been affirmed of Mai's and JD's loyalty to a humanity, and why they would very much consider being tasked to him temporarily, was the same reason why Ryder had been so disturbed by Mai. There was one answer that Mai had given during her subsequent debriefs that had caught Ryder off guard. It was a simplistic statement that seemed to deny the complexity of her skills and who she was. That everything about her, everything that she was and done for her, by her, made so she could kill in a capacity yet to be known to them, was because of something as simplistic as _**duty**_. Some fought for family, for revenge, for nothing at all. But she gave duty as her answer, and it was too simple to make sense. All her sacrifice summed up because it was what she was supposed to do.

_"By why do it all? Suffer how you have?"_

He replayed his question from the file alone, listening to it over and over again as he was left alone in the conference room.

She gave a_** nothing**_ answer.

If she stayed in her world, her universe, her life, she would've been chosen by the AI. Chosen by a construct known as Cortana, who saw fit to see her as important as the Master Chief. There was a reason why she was chosen that couldn't be chalked up by Covenant killed, or missions survived. It couldn't be quantified in her ability to change the tide of battle or loyalty to her superiors. Just as Cortana had chosen John as her Spartan in the end, on a factor that had been so arcane it was superstitious at best, she had chosen Mai by the same token. John had luck. Mai? Her talents lied in sound and fury signifying _**nothing**_. In the end, it made her the same as the man who would've saved humanity from not only the Covenant, but from an all-consuming evil that originated beyond the stars.

They were the same, thoughts and actions echoed across time and space.

She looked up at him and gave her answer.

_"Our duty, as soldiers, is to protect humanity. _ _ **Whatever the cost."** _

* * *

Mai had never eaten a pizza before.

It was true that the Spartan-IIIs had been culled from a very particular pack of children. Older than the Spartan-IIs upon their selection, they had been able to live a life before they were captured on the verge of adolescence. For many however, what lives they lived had perhaps not been lives worth living. Many of them had been orphans, stolen of any normal life by the Covenant. The promises of revenge had been the promise which many SPARTAN-IIIs held onto when they were trained and then sent to their deaths. They had been children who wouldn't be missed, with nowhere to go, and no family to go looking for them.

Whereas the Spartan-IIs were raised with some militaristic form of love, the Spartan-IIIs were born of misfortune, due to die in battle. Either conscripted or signed their life away, the Spartan-IIIs were never a terribly fortunate group of people.

All the luck, Lieutenant Commander Ambrose used to bellyache to Mai about, was taken by one Spartan alone.

If Mai and John-117 were equals, then they had been two sides to the same coin. All this to say she never had any luck.

Why she had been a Spartan-III was something she guarded so closely to her heart, that weighed so much within her, that she had hardly said a word about her upbringings to anyone still alive.

One of the circumstances of her early life had been, therefore, her being unable to know what a pizza was.

The streets of New Jerusalem made her know what hunger was to her very soul; the hardships she was born into perhaps the reason why she was the Spartan she was.

_"Do you think that the Spartan's lack of basic humanity helped?"_

_"Do you believe that the Master Chief succeeded because he was at his CORE broken?"_

In another reality, in another timeline, one of the creators of the Spartan Branch of the UNSC asked Catherine Halsey that. If Mai had been one of her own, maybe she could've known that answer. If she had known Mai, she would've known that a broken Spartan was by far a better soldier than the best human. Though she would never admit that price. Mai was born broken, and that was something Halsey could never replicate.

Pizza was good, she had learned now as JD had unashamedly scarfed down half a pepperoni pie. She had opted for cheese alone.

It was a decidedly quiet meal, the only people ever talking being Chakwas and Alenko. JD had hummed once and a while, nodding and generally being polite, however Mai had kept quiet, in the chair she had sat in she had subconsciously angled her legs toward JD.

It'd been nearly two decades since she had sat at a table like this and ate.

"So, uh, do you like pizza?" Alenko had tried to drift the conversation to the VIPs court.

JD had known that the Spartans weren't normal. To what extent he wouldn't dare guess, but he could tell that socially, Mai was not at all normal. As if she hadn't been in this situation before. He'd spoken more those last few hours than he had in a year, but it was for a good cause: covering for a Spartan.

"My father, he was a detective, and he always kept me at the station during weekends. That meant a lot of deliveries." JD admitted, he hadn't eaten the crust but that wasn't here or there. "It's good. Sauce was a little thick for my taste, cheese was good though."

Kaiden had tipped his cup of water at him. "One of the positives of Arcturus Station. We get cheese straight from Earth."

"Earth… right." How lucky, had JD considered himself, to know what Earth had looked like. How many humans had died for it without ever seeing humanity's home?

"You ever been? Or were you born on the colonies?"

All Mai had done was shake her head no in any regard, unwilling to answer that. JD had been more amicable. "Luna." he said once again.

"Oh, on one of the terraformed habitats, right?"

"Sure."

Chakwas had poked at Alenko. "Quit interrogating them Kaiden, I'm sure that's the last thing they need."

Truly the last thing they needed was a man of authority to walk in there, a paper envelope in his hands.

Chakwas and Alenko stood straight at attention. "Ah. Doctor Chakwas, Lieutenant Alenko." The man said. It was Captain Anderson.

"Sir." Kaiden had saluted.

"Sir." Chakwas had done the same as they were saluted down. What no one had anticipated was that moments after they had risen, JD and Mai did the same unanimously. They had rank still, and thus were susceptible to rank. That was the formality they could give in their situation as they squared their backs and forms. For him, they stood at attention, arms crooked into a salute. A sign of respect. They knew that, perhaps, he had a part in letting them eat.

"Lieutenant Gul, Private Durante." Anderson had saluted them down after a mental stumble.

They all stood at ease as they awaited for what the good captain had to say, but his gaze wandered to the pizza boxes first. "Did you enjoy it? It's not everyday I get to come to this station, and that pizza joint does rather well for itself out here. Family run too."

"Yes, sir."

JD had been off balance by Mai's answer.

"Reminds me of home, sir."

"Well good, because that's where we're going next."

Chakwas and Alenko had seemed confused, but Anderson was quick to verify. "Doctor Chakwas, Lieutenant Alenko, the Normandy is hitching a ride with a training ship on the way back to Earth from naval exercises with the Turians. The Normandy still needs to complete her crew, and regarding you two, we need to verify your aptitude before we decide what to do with you."

Mai raised an eyebrow, caution in her eyes. "Are we being tested sir?"

"Quite frankly, yes. Your stories are reliant on your ability as soldiers, and even though we have Private Durante's video footage, we'd like to see what you can do first hand."

"For what, sir?" She pressed on him.

"What do you think will happen to you, Lieutenant Gul?"

It was something they both thought of privately, in their own minds, but nothing they would admit to each other. They were both career soldiers, their entire lives preparing them for the war against the Covenant. Initially they each wanted to find a way to get back to the war, but it hadn't been as easy as simply hijacking a shuttle and jumping to the nearest UNSC outpost. To get back to their war meant to do another impossibility. They were good for nothing else, and it pained them to think, maybe, just maybe, they would be given only one option in the hands of the Systems Alliance:

_ **To serve.** _

"What's going on with the Covenant?" She asked in turn.

Anderson could only smile. "Rest assured, lieutenant, the Covenant has been brought in line."

Whatever that meant, they had only hoped that every single one had been glassed themselves.

There was nothing that they could do but abide by the Captain's orders. Next stop: Earth.


	5. 0-5: Combat Evolved

Mai had heard rumors of this kind of system for the later Spartan-III Companies. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality come together in physical training methods which pitted Spartans against Spartans in combat that bordered actuality: War Games. She never had the privilege, or the need, to be thrown into such training measures. Her teeth had been cut by her birth, her early life, and eventually into the throes of clandestine combat that she alone had been the progenitor of.

The program that followed in her wake had been called the Headhunters Program, and as she was doing now, she was very much headhunting in that simulated space. She was the very first Headhunter: where other teams required two Spartans, she accomplished missions all by her lonesome. Lone Wolf was right.

She had let the bolt of her MA5 fly forward after a hefty slap. For what tech the Alliance had, their ability to replicate objects in the simulation was 1:1. It felt like a real Assault Rifle, and she had known all her life how her body responded to that recoil.

Firearms as she and JD knew it had been long obsolete, gun powder and cartridges gone the way of mechanical keyboards and physical money. Instead they had been replaced with, essentially, mini mass drivers that handled and shot like firearms albeit with a near bottomless ammo capacity. It reminded her of the Covenant weapons in a way.

Her armor however, it hadn't felt quite the same. As in she had none but what she had fashioned out of a tool belt and a fanny pack, slings made out of duct tape and her faith in her knots. She had been refused access to her armor, and for that she would show them what she could do with nothing but her tech suit and a chip on her shoulder. That and several mags of ammo that she had, in that moment, known as real.

The Alliance weren't interested in seeing her operate with what they had, but rather, what she knew.

Stuck in that mockup of a three-story building, with around a platoon Alliance Marines breaching in through windows, doors, floors, and any hole they could blow, she was prepared. Prepared enough as she had kicked over the table in a concrete room and dug her hands into it as the concussive blast of a breaching charge kicked in the door she had just closed behind her.

Her head was ducked down behind that cover, and she felt in her feet around three Marines go into the room: a textbook breach as they spread out and aimed their guns toward her tabled cover. They hadn't expected her to lift that hefty table with one hand and slam all three of them back into the wall, concrete crumbling and metal armor denting was heard as the pained groans of Marines came, only to turn into screams as she let the table go, and fall upon the Marines, their heads exposed: Assault Rifles aimed at their heads as she let the ammunition pop off.

Before more men could enter the room by kicking down the table she had seen the wooden wall to her right that beyond led to the hallway leading to that door. She ran at it in a charge, breaking it down in a crash of supports and wood furnishing. She broke through into a Marine that had been unlucky enough to stack up on the other side, splinters exploding into him as he fell and slammed into the concrete wall on the other end.

Around the corner the men couldn't react fast enough as their sides were lit up by kinetic slugs in their sides, she rounding the bend and getting the jump. The rounds in her mag had been enough to take out all but one: the ammo indicator on the assault rifle flashing zeroes and red.

Above that building in a spectator's nest a congregation of admirals and observers had seen Mai burst out of a window from the second story, using the lone survivor of that breach as padding for her landing as, even when the man landed on his back out of breath and clearly defeated by a measure of pain he had never felt before, she delivered a punch to the side of his helmet.

She ran back into the building before any of the spectators could process what had just happened, gunfire and screams, albeit non-lethal, filling that training scenario chamber.

The information provided on the digitized windows of the spectator's balcony had read the remaining Marines who were combat capable in the scenario, and that number fell almost uniformly with how many seconds went by. Among other information had been her vitals, her gear, tracking her movements through cameras placed throughout. It was if they were watching a videogame or some blood sport, but to the Admiralty of the Systems Alliance, it was anything but a game.

This was how many of them, veterans of the First Contact War and the Skyllian Blitz, came to be introduced to Spartan Mai-B312. Of all the updates provided to the Admiralty in those last forty-eight hours, from Altis and the Covenant, it had been her that piqued their interests the most. That interest turned into morbid curiosity as Mai burned through the very first test that put her through her paces for the sake of observation.

"I've never seen anything like **it**." Admiral Mikhailovich of the Fifth Fleet had spoken like a man enthralled. At least he could say words. The Admiralty present had been mostly silent as they had seen a woman pull perfection out of her ability and made the best trained Marine fireteams of the Alliance to crumble beneath her.

Admiral Hackett had taken in a cold breath as he held his own hands behind his back, fingers tightening around each other till he was white knuckled. He had left Altis with the diplomats in charge of talks with the Covenant and the "Prophet of Destiny", only to link up with the training vessel and see what exactly humanity had smuggled away.

At least a dozen of the Alliance's highest rank Admirals had been there, and they stood initially unsure of what they had supposed to make of Mai. Surely the stories about her had been exaggerated.

Three Marines, so desperately trying to avoid getting eliminated by her, fear in their hearts, had barricaded themselves in a stairway of the building as their comrades were taken out around them. She came from the top down however, her foot breaking through a barricaded steel door's remains after it was blown apart by captured charges. With one hand she held that door in her hand as she threw it over the railing, flattening the Marine on the bottom of the stairs as the other two pushed up to meet her. She had jumped over the railing to meet the one on the midway of the stairs, her feet slamming into his chest and standing over him as she drew her M6 pistol, putting rounds into the front man's back as he tumbled over and fell down the stairs. The man she stood on had tried to crunch up and seize her, but in a snap her left leg came up and down in a merciless crunch: the man's armor dented through to his chest.

"This is how she handles non-lethal?" Admiral Mikhailovich had exasperated. Those were some of his men down there.

"She knows we'll lock her away forever if she does kill them." Hackett responded. The vitals on those Marines she had "eliminated" were all still stable at least, so he had brilliant self-control of herself. "Still, for her hate of the Covenant, why is she this good at combatting humans?"

There were a million items that could be observed as Mai ran through her first trial of the day. She wasn't even well rested, with nothing but a few meek pizza slices in her belly and annoyance firing her heart. The way she handled her weapons that were, to the Alliance and Council Space, so out of date and touch, it seemed to single her out as primitive. Yet primal seemed to be a good descriptor to how she fought, essentially naked in her form fitting under suit, jury rigged mag pouches and pockets on her.

"This isn't even with her armor." Commander Ryder had been there also, a vested interest in Mai having manifested in a compulsion to test her like this: to see if she was worth his time.

As it turned out she was worth the time of the whole Alliance at this rate.

JD on the other hand, Anderson had taken the time during their transit to take some time to observe him while the Admiralty was obsessed over Mai.

The SSV Montenegro was a re-purposed Dreadnought of the Systems Alliance fleet. Just as the Japanese had tried to get around the Washington Naval Treaty after the First World War, the Alliance had the Treaty of Farixen to contend with. Reassigning and stripping the hull of the Montenegro into a training vessel, not a war vessel, had kept it on hand while still abiding by treaty regulations of limiting dreadnoughts.

It served its purpose well as a mobile training station, hosting Interplanetary Combatives Training classes with ample opportunity for refining their skills. Anderson and Ryder had remembered the vessel fondly when they had been obliged to mentor classes here, however the sinister nature of why they were onboard today was felt by both of them.

Unlike Mai, JD had been allowed his armor. There had been nothing anomalous about it unlike Mai's MJOLNIR. Anyone could wear it, that much the HAZMAT techs had found out when they catalogued it and pulled it so as to get the video footage from his helmet.

What that meant for him however was that he now wore his armor again, and, for the first time, he'd been shooting humans in it.

His entire life as a Marine, he'd been trained to shoot at silhouettes that hadn't been human shaped, so everything about the scenario he had been thrown in felt unnatural. He never had been deployed against the Insurrectionists, and although he had known how to kill, taken many lives for many reasons, none had ever been human.

They loaded him into a wheat field that had been deceptively real.

The Marines and N-level candidates had been told that this were simply more training exercises and the two guests had been there to tests them. The trials had gone both ways however.

It was true: Mai and JD had known what war was, been to war, had more hours on the ground in combat than any in the Alliance. What that meant was beyond words, but it had to be proven. Mai had no problem killing humans, but some would say that she hadn't been human.

For JD, it was a different matter, one that had him aim at the back of an N-trainee's head through his M7 and not pull the trigger.

Thirteen trainees, both Marine and N-candidate, had been in that virtual space, wheat taller than all of them made, no cover but the damning brush. A game of hide and seek. Last man standing won, and it had been all thirteen versus JD.

He could tell these people were rookies. JD knew the sort. Somewhere along the way he had become a veteran ODST, just shy of one hundred drops. Whether it was by pure luck or (he wouldn't admit) his own skill, he had survived a long time in a profession where men died young. His gait was quieter than most, his nerves used to the high intensity of adrenaline and combat, breath controlled and mind focused on the number one rule of combat: survive. A professional by any other pretense, albeit one who had a shot but didn't take it.

Anderson had seen JD, at the beginning of the simulation as the two groups started on opposite ends of the football field sized virtual space, correctly assume the dispersion of the trainees as they approached.

That alone had caught the attention of Anderson.

JD had lain flat and squirmed through the virtual wheat and the virtual dirt, his black armor barely helping as the 5-meter spread gave him the gap he needed for overzealous trainees to blow through: eyes forward, but not up or down. Maybe fighting Grunts had given him a different perspective on how to fight and scan, but it was combat that formed his mannerisms: something that these trainees did not account for.

"Check! We clear?!" The trainee leader had yelled aloud.

A procession of 12 other clears came up and through as they all laxed.

"Hey is Anderson pulling our leg?" One of them asked jokingly. "Or that guy just up and quit?"

JD had sat up as he followed their voices, in a crouch with his M7 up and out.

That was when he found his target: the first of many.

He wanted to correct them verbally, to yell out and to check his six. He could not allow that however, not as the trainee did and halfway turned. The breath in his lung hitched and he did what he had to do. Life moved at moments at a time when gunfire started flying, and so he saw poetry in motion as slugs flew and hit the man squarely in his neck and peppering his side.

If the fire had been real, he would've been not dead, but bleeding out on the ground from five different holes.

The ODST had moved to a different angle as the trainee writhed in pain automatically. Soon enough, as JD had guessed, two of his squad mates had moved to check on him and cover, just like they had been trained to. The reality of war however didn't allow for such formalities and humanities. The Covenant had never given him breath to recover wounded comrades from harm's way.

Now he decided, for now, if Anderson had wanted it, he wouldn't either.

He depressed the trigger again as he saw the two trainees twitch and contort painfully as the slugs impacted their bodies, sending them to the ground as he kept moving over to the left: knowing that's where those two trainees came from. It meant that that side of the spread wouldn't be as covered.

The Trainee he had encountered first had his vision directed at the source of their pained groans, barely able to see JD in the peripheral as he had come up on his side and shoved him to the ground, M7 putting two in his chest.

When the trainee further down the line had moved down to assist the original two she had run into JD with her rifle down. It meant that she could barely stop her rushing momentum before four more shots rang out like paper getting punched through, sending her breathless to the ground, several bruises on her skin more. He had pushed forward now, now essentially behind them all as the training squad thought the shots came from their behind.

He pushed forward, holstering his M7S and taking out his pistol, his shooting arm held across his left forearm, almost as a base.

Pushing wheat asides to push daisies, he had come to the center of the line and to the back of a trainee who had heard the man running to him too late. His free arm reached out and around the trainee, barring across his neck and throwing him down as the pistol came down and shot the man in the neck.

JD heard rustling to his left: the barrel of a rifle poking through grain as he immediately joined the man on the ground on his own accord, SMG brought out during the fall as he fell to his side and aimed perpendicular.

He saw two sets of legs pushing toward him through his red dot.

He had slid and pushed himself laterally on his shoulder as he fired his M7S sideways, taking out the feet of two trainees as they fell into the wheat and he disappeared into it again, their bodies falling to the simulated dirt with a thud.

Dirt had been scooped up into his shoulder pauldron, but he paid no mind to it as he let the magazine in his SMG fly after he stood back up with a flick of his wrist, another mag for it in his hand from his mag carrier ready. Only the whizz of bullets around him had stopped his reloading, he immediately hitting the deck again and scrambling away horizontally to the incoming fire.

The impulses of gunfire kept his bearing toward the enemy as his pistol came out again, the two trainees unaware of where the ODST had gone as he disappeared into the grass.

By sound alone JD had stayed his feet, held his breath, and aimed with his eyes at the sound as he let a few rounds loose toward the gunfire.

"Agh!"

The pained screams of a trainee getting hit had signaled he had made a good guess and rushed toward the remaining trainee before he knew what was happening. To know that you had been the last man standing was a feeling that came in waves, and before the first had even come over the man JD had bent around the field of vision the last man had and gave him mercy.

The Marine felt the suppressor end of JD's M6S and knew its cold feel for it to be a gun barrel. The Marine knew his game was done, nodding and dropping his weapon as he, slowly, turned around to Six, the wheat fields around him disappearing into the digital nothingness.

"Appreciate it." The Marine said honestly. The M6S in his hand hadn't been real, but it felt it to JD as it also dissipated. He shook his head up and down subtly, looking around him, seeing the pained bodies of the twelve Marines he had downed, all creakily raising up.

He didn't know he had it in him to fight against fellow man like this; didn't knew he could do it. Yet he earned his applause as he heard a sparse few claps from Captain Anderson above him, watching in the balcony before he issued orders. "Return to the prep room, Private Durante. This is only test one of the day, and it's going to be some time before we get to Earth."

The weapons in his hands disintegrated into the digital dust as well, and so he had walked off with the rest of them, unable to look at them in the eye.

* * *

"Mai."

"JD."

They found each other alone, in between trials for rest and refit. There was a locker room they were allowed in and, as far as they could tell, they were given the privacy to use it alone. Not as if they had anything to lock up. His weapons had dissolved and it left him empty, the halls to this place empty, but always watching them.

They were separated, yet again, shortly after arriving on the ship and told of what would be happening for the next day as they made transit to Earth.

"How're they testing you?" She sat alone on a bench, furthest corner of the room, further locker from the door.

"Combat." He answered simply, unclasping his helmet form his head as he had meekly opened up a locker next to her for any contents. Only towels and a water bottle. He took the water bottle for a sip.

"Do well?" Her gear was alongside her: some jury-rigged chest rig held together by tape, boot lace, and a dream. Before he could answer a woman had appeared before them around the corner of the locker aisles. Her lab coat had blended into the room almost harshly, silver paneling and metallic sheens around. Nothing like the greys of a UNSC warship.

A darker skinned woman, data pad in her hand and a hazmat bag in the other.

"Hi! Hello." She said awkwardly. "I've been instructed to collect something from you, Miss Gul."

She pronounced her name wrong. It was Gul, almost like ghoul. It was understandable however. She was an anomaly in more ways than one among the Spartans. She remembered, held within herself, the knowledge of her last name. Her tenacity to kill was tied in no small part to her stubbornness. When asked, she would give it, even in the face of superior officers who had tried to take that from her.

"What do you need?" There was always a bite of hostility in her voice, hidden by professionalism.

"Your undersuit. The observers and admiralty believe that it is enhancing your abilities as well."

There were five layers that counted as her techsuit: the black outer layer which had been seen, and then beneath that a pressure sealed sandwich of polymerized lithium niobocene and hydrostatic gel which kept her insulated and pressurized. Mai would be lying to say that it didn't enhance her abilities. One would be quick to assume that the titanium armor and its combination of external plating was accountable for the Spartans trademark abilities and strength, however it was the undersuit which held those secrets. The liquid metal crystal piezoelectric layer had been the artificial muscle which amplified all physically exerted actions of a Spartan, right down to reaction time.

"Is it Alliance policy for them to rid its troopers of its necessary tools?"

The scientists squirmed like an intern under Mai's unkind, world wary gaze and question. "Uh- uhm. I've just been told to collect it from you, so if you could please…" The scientist shrunk as Mai looked straight at her, gaze dead, as if daring her to move to complete her orders.

She was a trained soldier either way, and it showed on her skin. She'd never killed a man without the help of MJOLNIR, but she was trained without it.

Mai bared her teeth for a moment, a nostril flared as she had decided to not fight and simply to feel for the mechanical latch on her wrist that kept the techsuit air tight on her form. When the sound of hissing came and went the suit had puffed up, only to be easily taken off almost like a pair of overalls. Naked as the day she was born, with nothing but a string necklace and a wooden wheel held onto it left on her form.

The researcher, she had been taken off guard by Mai's willingness to disrobe and the speed of which she did so. JD couldn't necessarily think anything of the display, locking eyes with Mai before casually looking away and attending to himself. She was surprised that he did, as if ashamed.

"I- I'll get you some fatigues as soon as possible." The woman stammered as she had slunk away with her techsuit, leaving Mai and JD alone, the woman somewhat huffing annoyed as she had sat facing the opposite direction next to JD.

The ODST had more class than anyone could reasonably give to a Marine, not even considering a look for purposes of the male regard. Mai, likewise, hadn't even thought of it. It wasn't quite known if the Spartan-III Augmentations had the same hormone suppressing effects to the extent of the IIs. At least for Mai, the tendencies toward the flesh, of lust and love, were suppressed. Ambrose had corroborated this on a condition however: It wasn't necessarily the augmentations or the drugs, he had surmised: it was the situation and the war. Love was taken by them not by Halsey, but _**by conflict**_, and Mai liked to think that was the case in those sparse moments where she had seen Marines steal moments during the war in downtime and final seconds. To think of love, what she thought of as love, brought her back to a place she could only in her dreams and nightmares go back to.

"You alright?" She finally said after a few moments of silence, JD tightening the laces on his boot keeping occupied.

He could reasonably guess what she was referring to. He turned over his head from boot to her, squarely on her face as far as best he could. Didn't see anything, at least, outside of the accidental peripheral.

She didn't say it teasingly, she didn't say it erotically or as such. It was just a question. She didn't know how it could be taken otherwise why he had looked away from her at that instance. In military life privacy and modesty were never in good supply, and they all lived without it. She was the epitome of a military life.

"Have a girlfriend. Is all." He said simply once, turning his head more, eventually swinging his feet over so he could face the same direction as her. "I mean- I do. Sorta."

"And?"

He couldn't help but look at her in the eye again and tilt his head. He didn't know what to say. "It's ah- complicated. If I get back to her I don't want to say I've seen someone like-"

He drifted off. _**If**_ he got back to her. To be honest to himself, and being honest was something he had been being to himself very much lately in light of their situation, their relationship wasn't much more than a simple conduit for exertion of relief and stress built up by the war. His parents wouldn't certainly approve of him having that kind of relationship with a dock worker over the colony of Cascade, but, in what shore leave he did have he could think of worse ways of spending them.

With how the war was going, every day could've been their last.

That's what made the sex better after all.

"You've seen women naked before, right?" Mai pressed on him, a little annoyed, not getting his point.

He didn't take embarrassment from it however. He gleamed a detail.

"You… don't get _**why**_ people would be uncomfortable?"

"Because I'm a Spartan?" That was the easy answer, but not the correct one. It was an excuse that Mai had used all her life when other servicemembers had been in her presence and had their jaws dropped or their eyes in awe. She never enjoyed the admiration.

He took one cursory glance down, just so he could make the point to her and himself and to just get that over with. He took more information away from it then he had anticipated.

"It's because you're a woman, and I'm seeing someone." He tried to say casually.

Scars. That's all he could notice. Scars, bruises, twisted flesh on skin that fought to be brown, but ended up a sickly pale. Muscles and wounds long since faded, telling the story of a war gone on too long, creating the only type of person that could fight this. JD felt no eroticism from this. He couldn't, not on first glance and saw memories of battlefields on her breasts.

War and combat had overridden social sensibilities, social understandings: how to live in the name of how to fight. She had felt nothing wrong with it, seen nothing wrong with it as she let out a breath and simply waited.

"You never answered me on how your first test went."

He gathered his helmet onto his lap, thumb running along its rim. "Nothing I haven't dealt before... situation wise. Apparently in special forces training they don't teach their recruits down or up and to check and hold their sectors properly."

She ran a hand to the back of her head below her bun of hair, scratching it in consideration of what she was about to say. "Admiral Hackett. Captain Anderson. Ryder… they all said something about how humanity's never been to a war like ours. Might be because they don't have enough real-world veterans to trickle down."

The ODST Sergeant that trained JD had survived over 270 drops. After that he had earned his reward: to instead just stay within the inner colonies and trainer more Helljumpers. For Mai, her trainer had been those imbued with the creation of the Spartan-IIs themselves, including a Spartan-II himself.

The knowledge imbued in both of them had been the culmination of lifetimes: almost evolutionary steps in their warfare and special tactics that kept humanity's head above water in the war. Here, in that reality, humanity had just hardly begun to wade in shallow waters.

"Have you thought about it, Mai?" JD quietly said, finger to his chin, feeling faded scars from the past.

"What?"

"Serving them?" He clarified. She seemed taken aback. In the last two days her life had been thrown upside down and casts asides, her purpose rendered null. To think that forward it was, it felt, treasonous. Yet who would hold them accountable. She blinked once, taking in a breath and considering, hardly minding the cold of the room as JD finally remembered where they were and gathered a towel from a locker, throwing it at her. "Cover up. Please."

She did, standing looking to the door which the researcher left to. "Advisors. Maybe."

"Not out there?" In the field he meant.

She shook her head. The choice to fight or not was not given to the UEG and the UNSC. Survival was the reward, and that was far more valuable than any political or economic goal which anyone could possibly think of. Given a choice to fight a war, she would have to believe in it.

"We're desperate measures. So not if things are desperate."

JD could agree in a simple nod, however she lingered on the thought: desperation. It hung over every battle every action and every offensive maneuver that she personally had been sent on. She wasn't good at hiding the emotion on her face, and JD knew she was lost in thoughts she would never otherwise allow herself to think:

The war was not going well. Not if they found Reach. If they had found Reach then Earth would've been next. The only hope they could've possibly had was if ONI had some sort of plan in the running that could've stopped that war in the coming weeks. A deus ex machina to a lifetime lost.

A thought lingered in both of them. A dangerous thought. One that spoke to extinction.

Flung into another reality on the eve of their destruction, perhaps, just maybe, they would be the sole survivors of a human race.

"Do you think we would've won?"

The question hit JD like a drop, sucking the air from his lungs and the warmth from his heart. The answer that his logical mind gave him had been damning. He could only suck in the cold air in turn and refuse to answer, putting on his helmet as he awaited whatever came next.

"I don't like it." Mai had barely heard it as he sat back down on the metal bench. Barely, but she did. Her elbow had tapped at his arm to clarify, a helpful nudge to push him to elaborate. "Fighting people."

She sympathized. She really did. Every time. She mourned the loss of every human dead, even by her hand. Every dead human was one less to stand against the Covenant.

Once, long ago, man had been at war with man.

That was initial reason why the Spartans had been created in the first place. He did not know this, but it pained Mai to know.

If, perhaps, humanity was the only enemy itself had, she wondered if her own mother would still be alive today. She wondered if she herself would still be alive. Poor, hungry, and sick. Alive, at least.

"You get used to it."

JD had looked at her through his helmet, his visor still polarized. She could feel the expression however: feel the angst and the worry. "Did you?"

She could give no answer.

* * *

Exercise after exercise, scenario after scenario. Some alone, some together. The day it would take to Earth was still ongoing onboard the Montenegro, and that meant that the two VIPs had plenty of time to prove their aptitude. This time a sniping mission had kept them occupied in the simulator space, the trick of hardlight and augmented reality as afforded to the training ship turning a rather small room into an endless vista of a jungle and a target several thousand meters away.

"They work well together." Rear Admiral Mikhailovich of the Fifth Fleet had been one of Hackett's forward flotillas. A staunch man, befit of breaching into enemy lines. The Normandy was originally to be assigned to him in order to press his flotilla's tactics of pushing first into enemy lines, as per the Normandy's unique qualities, however Captain Anderson had taken that privilege instead to his detriment. "I've never personally never seen soldiers of their caliber perform like that. Even the N7s."

The Admiral meekly looked over to a present Ryder and Anderson. Surprisingly both had agreed with nods and a tired look in their eyes.

"You have to understand that a war beyond our understanding had them become that qualified." Ryder growled, not happy with the situation. "I trained some of the men here, Admiral, there's no way that she would be that good unless she's done it before."

"That's the interesting thing." Anderson shifted in his chair. Some stood, some sat over that viewing deck over the training area. "Mai seems supremely qualified in fighting against humans, while Private Durante isn't quite comfortable."

They were all very uncomfortable with that admission. Their combined knowledge of the Insurrection had been lacking, to say the least. For Mai it had been out of silence, but for JD, it was out of not knowing. The Insurrection was never a problem he had to contend with as a Marine.

"Shooter by eye. 3-Sector, two o'clock, 15 mil. Go to glass ident footmobile."

"U-shaped vine hanging low to ground, three trunks one discolored the other marked up by claw marks. Contact. Target: Male, grey body armor, rifle held idle."

Their tactical chatter had filled the room, their voices picked up by their comm sets. First operation with standard Alliance issue weaponry and they had taken it in stride. As long as it had a trigger they would adjust. They'd handle far more alien weapons before.

Six had been on the sniper, JD: Her spotter. A pair of binoculars had been his eyes as his helmet was off and the tool shoved into his face.

"2,000 meters." The ODST said on his belly, the two covered by foliage as they had waited a good half an hour for the target to blink into view. Six had held her breath. She'd made longer shots on smaller targets. "Clear to engage."

Up in observation Ryder didn't look as the loud gunshot of a sniper rifle punched through sound, air, and eventually virtual flesh. He knew she would hit.

"Target down." JD reported.

They rotated JD and Mai through the same exercises. The only thing that removing her body suit from her proved that she could take the pain that came with it. She still fought like she had armor on and if that wasn't a testament to her hardiness, nothing else that they would throw at her here would be.

JD was fighting at a level only recorded by an N7, while she had been off the charts in every single aspect.

Stamina, strength, fortitude and mental endurance: it all spoke to the simple fact that they had seen, and survived, worse.

"They would revolutionize or warfare techniques if we're able to analyze any tactical data they might have. They've been to a conventional and guerilla war against a larger alien foe across multiple environments. Any knowledge they give us would help us accommodate a war if it would come in the future." Mikhailovich pressed on.

Ryder had been dismissive of Mikhailovich. "Then why have we kept the simulation targets purely human?" No Turians, no Krogan, no Batarians. Just human targets.

"Well we can't justify their inherent xenophobia." Anderson noted rightfully.

The Admiralty of the Systems Alliance had been there: the most veteran officers of the Navy brought forth and given a demonstration of what they had pulled out of Altis. War Hawks, Diplomats, and everything in between. The dozen or so Admirals had been responsible for dictating military policy and maneuvers throughout the Galaxy where humanity was concerned, and this was one of the few time since the Skyllian Blitz had they all been gathered.

"Well even if we can't draw anything from their experiences, their gear is more than enough to look into: her armor especially. We've never seen anything like it." One of the more ground deployment-oriented Admirals had watered over it. "But the damn woman won't say anything about it."

"How can something like that operate without any Mass Effect field generator? It's almost a ton?"

"Semi-powered, perhaps. Readings we're getting from it denote that there is some sort of power generation scheme within it."

With the exercise done they had waited in idle as they awaited Anderson to direct them, he speaking into his omnitool as he sat and looked on. "Very good. Next test will be in thirty minutes sharp. Take a break."

The two had nodded up at the observation deck, quietly making their way back to the locker room as the world around them digitized to its default blankness.

"The other trainees, both Marines and the N-candidates, their training leaders have been asking for us to reprimand them, you know." Ryder snarled, letting the Admiralty know. "Saying how Mai acted with a recourse as if this was actual combat. Not training."

Anderson grit his teeth. "I don't like seeing our own men get beat to a pulp, but still we're so far behind them in warfighting."

"What? Do you want to start a war just so our troops can get some good experience?" Another admiral in the Admiralty spoke ghastly. "I'll hop over the border into Batarian space right now if that's the case."

"No. That isn't necessary." Hackett had cut into him. "I think what's important to understand from all of them here is that, what they're capable of, we are too."

In the end, they were all only human there, and it scared them all.

* * *

"What're your operation specialties, by the way?" Mai asked JD as he chaffed in his ODST BDU. Laying on his chest for a long period of time wasn't the most comfortable of things as he adjusted in that locker room.

"Every Marine, a Rifleman." He echoed the old adage before tiredly looking at her, patting at his hip at the empty pistol holster. "Certified in CQB. Good marks with pistol aptitude. Better than my rifle shooting to be honest. Otherwise standard shock trooper training. Soon to be certified as a combat medic." He motioned his hand at her as if it was her turn.

She shrugged. "Everything."

He could only believe her. She discarded her jury rigged gear, her Alliance fatigues delivered to her a short while ago. With it on her she didn't look too different from a regular service member in the Alliance, if not bigger than the usual female variety.

"I'm gonna see if there's a gym, a weight room, or- I don't know. Something."

He wanted to voice his objections, that it'd be unwise to go wandering on a ship they hadn't been familiar with, but, then again, she was a Spartan. There was a good enough space on the bench anyway for him to get some shut eye. He waved at her, she returning it kindly with a nod as she went off and away.

* * *

What they could give the Alliance, humanity, was a topic that had been alight on all the minds of the admirals. More important than even the Covenant. The three hundred year distance between the humanity of the UEG and the humanity of the Alliance had been felt alone by the effectiveness of a soldier.

Humanity had been alone, left unchallenged for a long period of time before the Covenant appeared, and that had meant time to grow and develop what could not be developed there.

The talk of technology especially had given the Admiralty pause

"The Savannah's Slipspace drive is missing, but, given recordings from JD, it places it within the Covenant ship still on Altis."

The Ardent Prayer had gone down intact, but it was descended down upon by the Covenant shuttles and transporters before anything could be done. It was point of notice however that it had been resumed flight capabilities relatively quickly.

In fact the Ardent Prayer had transported the delegation of the Covenant to the 5th Fleet and the Council diplomats, back by a flotilla of combat fighters smaller ships.

"Arrangements are being made with the Covenant as we speak." Hackett had nodded. "They have no usage for a slipspace drive of human make, hopefully."

The Admirals there had already gone over the possibilities of "Slipspace", even as basically as Mai and Durante had said of it. Long range FTL without the Relays. Militarily, exploration wise, scientifically, if humanity had felt free now among the stars, the ability to use slipspace would be pure ascension.

They were not foolish however, science that might've been tested and reasonable to the ODST and Spartan, hadn't been so with the Alliance. It was the same reason they were still being tested now.

It was still enticing however, the thought of using everything that had been offered to them.

The Admiralty all sat in chairs or stood by the railing of the observation deck, looking past the glass when they were in, on their toes about what Durante and Mai could do. Seeing was believing that day, and they all believed.

Now was the matter of what was to happen to them.

Anderson had quieted any discussion before it started. "As I said. The Prime Minister has given me orders to keep them under command of the Normandy for the time being. The Normandy will be hidden enough, and it'll let them see the galaxy at large to see what they're working with. If we give them that service, that mission, they'll come around.

"And you would have them accompany you on the Spectre evaluation mission?" An admiral had aired his doubts aloud. It was dangerous, needlessly complicated.

"They're used to being cogs in the machine, and if we can adjust them to ours, they would no doubt be there for humanity when we need them the most." Anderson responded back, carefully.

"The ODST we can carefully track. His psychological and physical profile as its shaping up to be is something we understand," the Admiral stressed. "However that Spartan is something we cannot. She did not tell us a damn thing about her training except what she is capable of. If she was born by the UNSC for war, we might have an issue. She's more Krogan and Turian than human at this point."

"And yet from what they've told us and shown, they have deep humanist interests: They know what it was like to fight for our race's survival. I want to see what they're capable of in its prospering."

Anderson was interrupted.

"Sir. Call from Ambassador Udina." It was Joker, routing a message.

"To my location."

There had been a holographic projector there that had been meant for quantum communications. Soon enough on a small little circular pad a full-sized man had come from an orange glow: older, shrewd, hair greying and thinning, but exactly what he looked like.

Ambassador Udina had been mankind's current delegate to the Citadel, a man who had earned his political stripes after many a battle over Turian defense agreements and Salarian technological treaties. Not likable, but hearts and minds wasn't his job. His job was to elevate humanity to the Council.

"Do you have any idea how much extra work has come my way Captain Anderson?!" His first words had been strained and aggravated. "We have just been introduced to nearly a dozen new species capable of space flight flying underneath one flag, and you saw it fit to conceal humans that came with them?! If the Council learns that we extradited humans that were caught up in this our Spectre and Council Seat preparations will be sent back months!"

Right to it then. "I'm sorry Ambassador, but you know that if these two were left to be analyzed by the Council, more questions would be sent our way."

Hackett had made note of the discussion. "It was my call Ambassador. It was best to deal with Durante and Gul internally."

Udina sniffled. "You might be right, but the timing of this isn't at all going to help. I've been asked to propose to the Council by Prime Minister Shastri that the Covenant are an internal affairs matter seeing as they were in Alliance Space. If… reports of the Covenant's power are to be believed, our negotiations with them might enable to Alliance to stand higher in the galactic circle."

For as much as they all spoke of Mai and JD, the question of the Covenant had been around the corner and what they could offer. That is if they cooperated.

"Let's worry about what we can do on our own first." Hackett had been wise to remind them all. "Are Spectre preparations still underway Ambassador?"

"Yes, Admiral." Udina responded promptly. "However the Prime Minister also reported that these two are planned to be on the Normandy's complement during the Spectre evaluations! Think Anderson, is that _really_ wise?!"

The conversation was retread, but the orders which Anderson drafted up and Shastri approved had also been sent through the Admirals. By a slim margin it had passed by the majority.

"I am not intractable. They are humans, after all." Udina continued. "But to set them off in only two weeks? My training for galactic affairs took _**years**_."

"I've got a feeling that they can handle it." Hackett had remarked, tiredly. Heroes had often been regular people thrown int the thick of it, after all, and it wouldn't be as if they were going in unsupported.

"Maybe we can have them, after a certain time, have these two become Spectres. They certainly would be capable." It was a shrewd and over-enthusiastic thought, but it got traction among some of the Admirals as they spoke among themselves.

Ryder was less receptive. He had originally been a pick for humanity's first Spectre, however Anderson was chosen in favor of him two decades ago. Even then that mission had gone sour and blocked humanity out of the chance until now. "That's a dangerous thought, ambassador."

Udina had thumbed his nose at Ryder. That had been coming from the man who had been forced into a retirement for pursuing AI research. Still Anderson had actually agreed.

"We have to be careful who represents humanity. It was the same for you, remember that." Anderson pointed at the hologram, and it stayed his tongue. Anderson was right.

"Well, _**what about Shepard?" **_Udina asked, as if in summary, for one last run through. "Earthborn… both her parents are noted officers in the Navy."

"Didn't matter, at least growing up. She ran away from home early on and raised herself on the streets of Los Angeles. Learned to look out for herself before enlisting."

Hackett remembered how Shepard became known throughout the Alliance. "She proved herself during the Blitz, held off enemy reinforcements and then continued on to counter attack until no resistance was left… I suppose being the only survivor of Akuze tends to shape a Marine."

"She's the only reason Elysium is still standing, and when we attacked Torfan she knew what had to be done." Anderson affirmed.

"Well we certainly can't question her courage." Udina admitted.

"Humanity needs a hero," Anderson looked back to the statistics thrown up on the window of Mai. "Shepard might be the best we've got. But I think it would go a long way if she has the support of the best that came from another humanity."

Udina's hologram flickered, hand to his chin, but eventually sighing and nodding. He understood. "I'll make the call."

Mikhailovich snarled, a warning in his words. "If they get loose. If that Spartan gets loose. We could be dealing with a political disaster that would rival the start of the Krogan Rebellions."

An alarm rang on all of their omni-tools. "All admirals to the gym observation room. We have a situation regarding the Spartan Mai."

Udina had sucked in his breath as he looked to Anderson and Hackett, only nodding and flickering out. The projector hadn't even went cold by the time the room had cleared and they had all been running out the door.

* * *

The gym, much like the other training areas, had been attached to an observation deck for the upper officers to look down upon who they were mentoring. Mai had taken in this detail along with the entire lay of the room before she taken her first breath in it. Tactical awareness had been baked into her senses and it helped her scan the room as she saw the pickings of a rather well outfitted gym. Physical fitness was the same, regardless of the humanity. Still, regardless, there wouldn't be anything there worthwhile for her.

She could bench her own weight, armor included, and that far exceeded any sane gym weight that hadn't been designed for either a trained gorilla (unlikely) or a Spartan.

Scanning the room revealed this as well: it was in use. Before that however she saw to her left and right guards, posted there generally.

"Hm? I don't recall seeing you during boarding or the exercises today?" A guard called out to her the moment she made eye contact. She was hard to miss, her darker complexion, despite the paleness that came with a lack of sun, compounding with her height and tone.

She didn't answer, scanning the room more. Several more trainees, some faces she recognized during her testing.

"Hey, I'm talking to ya'!"

The guard had spoken at her loudly.

When she did look over her piercing blue eyes had silenced his hurried tone. The Marines and SOF here training, they all spoke of comfort and familiarity. The Corps in any branch was a family, dysfunctional, but a family. Anyone who stepped on those bounds had been dealt with or outcasted.

It was evident throughout the training vessel that those onboard had been too comfortable with each other.

"None of your business." She stated once, walking into the gym fully toward the weight racks.

The gaurds naturally followed.

"It is my duty," He said, Mai more concerned with the fact two rifles were now following her.

Eavesdropping wasn't something she was officially trained it, but it was a useful skill. As was why she had begun to understand that "N" was a ranking system of SOF, and the higher they were the more they bellyached about being shut down by someone who hadn't had a number.

"SOF on guard duty?" Mai grunted.

"Ah, even as an N5, I'm expected to, when I'm on this vessel, attend to duties that would be beneath me." Guard duty was one of them, an assault rifle in her hand. The fact that two guards were following her had drawn attention: the main group in that gym all around an Asian man, hair longer than usual, but probably allowed with SOF privileges. N5? She thought. Must be a scale.

"Who's this?" He asked as he made his way over with his posse. Mai had quickly sorted out the weights. Even the heaviest was light for her. Still it had to do as the floor based dispenser spat out five in a row, ten total as she had hooked and clamped the weights to it. "Someone who's gonna bite off more than you can chew obviously. What are you a biotic? This tricks been done before."

She refused to speak to the man, or anyone, as she had rounded herself a circle for lifting space on a mat, at least the length of the bar in circumference.

When she had used one hand to lift up one five hundred pounds with one hand, not a grunt heard from her as she tried to make it hard.

'_Never show off, three-twelve.' _Ambrose spoke to her once.

She couldn't help it if they refused to look away and saw her breathlessly, effortlessly, lifted a weight with one arm which took the biggest of them two and a lot of prep work.

"Not bad at all." If Mai was able to get the hint she would've known that one comment was directed less at her lifting form and rather how well her form was lifted. Less eloquently put-

"You have a nice butt."

She ignored this as she continued to lift, to drown out the chatter. She had a nice butt for a reason. Dares for her to put on more weight, what she ate, what augments she had if any, all questioned asked of her as she went through a routine that no one would bother her for. She ignored them all.

Conversation drifted, naturally, to the events of today and yet to come. The training exercises that most of them were all battered in.

"_Yeah man, I ain't never seen anything like that today."_

"_You- you think that was humanity's first Spectre that we saw today? I heard chatter from the Citadel about how they're nominating one person soon."_

They all spoke and whined of being beat. Naturally to these higher tier Marines and SOF, being beat wasn't something they were familiar with.

"But how could she?" Was the general question.

She had an answer. "You lack actual combat experience. Counter-terrorism and COIN ops differ."

"As if you would know any better." One of them rebutted.

"I would, as is _**why**_ I beat you all."

The realization came over all of them fast and hard. "Hey, you're that VIP _**bitch**_. Taking advantage of all my buds, right? This is just a _**training exercise**_ for fuck's sake."

She had continued lifting, obviously not bothered by the weight or the man. "Train how you fight. Fight how you train."

"Yeah? How the hell did you train huh? No N7 I've ever seen fight like you before."

"Classified." She said simply.

Naturally lifting as much as she had she drew a crowd, lifting with one arm what normally people max at bench. That was the one thing that was good about being a Spartan in the gym: no one bothered her. So they had surrounded her as she tried to blankly stare forward, trying to find a way to make being there worth it for her nerves and fitness. The crowd that had been a part of the conversation wasn't helping.

"Oh what are you? Too good for us lowly Ns?"

They spoke like ODSTs.

Maybe that's why she had… liked? Liked JD for what little time they had been together. He was quiet, thoughtful. Different.

"Not up to me."

"Might explain why Admiral Hackett and the Admiralty are here." One Marine theorized.

Upon the revelation that she had been the VIP that especially was beating the snot out of them, the crowd had gotten rowdy, hunger in their eyes to get even. Training exercises were supposed to be mutually beneficial, not a complete murder. Perhaps it had wounded the pride of the SOF that someone indeed was better than them, or perhaps that they truly were just mad at her liberal use of pain that was, fairly, unwarranted.

Mai knew not what mercy was however. Mercy meant to hesitate, and the moments counted in battle.

"Looks like they ain't here now though, huh?" An N-trainee hinted up above at the empty observation deck. "Way you talk, seems like you're due to be knocked down a size."

She froze midway through a rep, eyes looking directly through the man that said that, sizing him up. "You gonna be the one to do it?" He backed down.

Some would dare. "Come on, fist to fist. None of that bullshit asymmetrical training exercises. Just pure fighting."

"You don't want to do that." She said gutturally, keeping her fingers busy on the texture of the steel plate instead of drifting to the man's neck.

"Maybe it was all a trick of the training simulation! She's got an unfair advantage because she needs it!"

"Oh, what's wrong, going to go home and cry to your _**mama**_?"

He got in her face, his rough hands seizing her cheeks, the weights in her hands dropped to the floor in a loud clang.

Blink and miss, and anyone who was looking had not been able to see a man, near 250 pounds of muscle and meanness be thrown down to steel in a punch.

JD had heard the stories: of a young Spartan, twenty-five years ago. The entire reason there had been a grudge between ODSTs and the Spartans. Passed down from one ODST generation to the next. It was as if he was reliving history as Mai stood there in that training arena like the Earth boxers of old, and faced a trifecta of special forces soldiers come to test her for the sake of testing her.

She, sometime, somewhere, must've heard the same story as she looked up at the viewing deck and hoped someone was looking. An ODST was.

The Admiralty and the observers arrived, Ryder having taken JD as well. They looked down on her as the fun began, and she had looked up and given JD eyes filled with regret. Just, somehow, someway, he had heard that same story too of the Spartan that came to kill ODSTs.

The story went like this: five ODSTs confronted a Spartan-II in a gym of a UNSC carrier. The Spartans were freshly minted, new to the world and the battlefield. They'd been barely teenagers yet had the bodies of Olympic athletes. They were fickle, edgy creatures at that point, unsure of how too process their augmented bodies and recently dealing with their first operational losses among their flock. And yet the ODSTs, in a sense of bravado that was self-admitted after so many retellings, dared to take on that Spartan in the ring in unarmed combat.

There was fear derived from history in JD's eye as the admiralty looked and saw the Ns step forward, surrounding Mai slowly as she stood like statue, her fists curled.

Two ODSTs, two of the UNSC's top troopers at the time, had died that day when they faced off against that Spartan. Two dead after five tried to take them on. The Spartan had punched through them around like _sacks of meat_, those who survived disabled for the rest of their life from injuries that were akin to, according to the official biopsy, was like they were thrown through a meat grinder.

At the end of the day the lone Spartan had reigned victorious over them all.

She started to take in a long, lone breath, eyes closed.

She didn't finish it before she snapped.

She felt the barrel of an Avenger touch the back of her head for a second, her arm cracking sound as it reached backed and grabbed it, pulling it and the man that held it over her and in front of her in a toss that betrayed her size: sending one man into another and onto the ground as she continued to hold onto the gun. The N6 to her side had made a move to grapple her, but the gun's stock came first as she swung it like a bat: impossibly fast, bone breaking, skull cracking.

The Admiralty board winced as JD looked on.

The man who had taken the butt of the Avenger stumbled as he held his hands to his face, screaming in pain. The darker woman who had now been to Mai's back tried to jump onto it: but she wouldn't have it. Not as the bent gun dropped to the floor and her two fists curled. Her movement, her strength, they all betrayed the dexterity of her: how fast she could move and how quick she could strike. She twirled around, putting the momentum in her back hand as the N5 woman, mid jump, took her knuckles into her throat thrown to the ground as a small snarl appeared on Mai's lips.

She had stood over her as a bird of prey looks down on a rabbit, and just like that instinctual possession of all predators to throw themselves upon prey, she did not give any quarter, any time for breath, to that woman who had her throat punched into.

This wasn't a sparring match, the Admiralty realized too late. Mai wasn't a test dummy, and she was not to be tested. This was not a show of capability, this was an execution.

Mai's leg came into the left ribs of the woman on the ground, sending her away and to the ground on top of the man who had his face broken in as the two other men who had been thrown before stood, hands up, fists curled, ready to fight.

And all at once the gym had been flooded with Marines and N-level candidates, many of them having already been beaten by Mai. They made a circle around them, like a ring, hollering and cheering filling the air as they were all witness to a fight and, more importantly, an opportunity to see this unknown VIP brought down to size.

Those who had been broke and bleeding had been dragged out, blood streaking in their paths.

She sized up the two men left: a darker man and the Asian. He was Japanese perhaps, anger on his lips as it quivered.

"Come on _Kai Leng_! Beat the shit out of her!" She heard a Marine jeer.

Kai Leng had only snarled. "Get out of the ring, sergeant." He referred to the other man, who looked surprised, but disappointed. After a moment of consideration, the man had reluctantly abided, stepping into the crowd. "Throw me a bar!" he yelled out.

One from the weight racks had been thrown, empty of weights, but still with considerable metal and swinging potential. She could only imagine him as an Elite, sword ready, as he assumed a stance he'd seen before from Zealots. Her body had reacted accordingly as she recoiled back, forcing the ring of people to abide.

Fights, one to one, were not thirty minute affairs or even ten or five. They were fought and won in a flash, the victor decided far faster than any training would elaborate..

His swings with the weight bar had cut through the air like a sword with such control and grace Mai had mistaken him for an Elite, she backpedaling until she felt the hands of other men push herb ack and toward the man in the middle of a swing. She raised both her arms in front of her face as she faced the swing, pushing through as metal rang against bone and the entire crowd recoiled in disgust as they thought they heard someone's arms being snapped.

No such thing happened however as the cold, burning hot pain flowed through Mai's arms, only to reveal that the strike had recoiled the bar and Kai Leng's swing.

The strike would've broken lesser men.

She was by no means lesser there.

Using the pain, she balled her fists as she dropped her arms and swung out with her right toward Kai Leng, the man shuffling back as the first barely missed his head. She kept up the swing however, going into a spin as the other fist caught his chin.

The force of the punch stammered him as he spit onto the ground, hunching over only to get a boot in the side of his face in a forceful kick.

Stumbling back again he found purchase to prepare for another swing as he felt his face swell, the taste of iron in his mouth.

It wasn't his best swing, not when she caught it with her bare hands and ripped it out of his hands, ripping the flesh of his pads as she used her elbow to punt into his chest.

He stumbled back before dropping the bar, going with his fists as he swung at her straight like a boxer. She could only deflect the punch away with a strike of her forearms, bring his bearing down and his face into her knee as she grabbed his long locks, tossing him behind her into the wall on onlookers, dropping to the floor unkindly as her approach waved anyone away who would dare help.

With one stomp on the bar, it flew up, into her hands and held like a staff and approached.

Kai Leng had seen her approach, laughing through the hazy pain, obviously having found a match.

"I see you know how to fi-_**FUA-!**_" The tip of the bar came up and across his face again, dragging against his teeth as they shattered. Hot fire in his nerves as his mouth bled red and made a mess of the floor, splattering those in the path of the spray as he spit up and screamed.

She never hesitated in the take down. She wouldn't know. Wouldn't let them say any words. She had killed me far faster than this.

Ryder had disappeared from the observation post almost immediately before anyone could stop him. His destination obvious.

Mai had stunned the crowned into silence and horror. They were expecting a good-hearted hand to be reached out to him, to help him up. They were both obviously Marines, right? This was all fun and games, of ego and hubris being tested and backed up by steel and strength.

This however, this was… brutal. Without mercy.

She didn't care for any of them.

"_**Get her!"**_

"_**What gives that bitch the right?!"**_

Kai Leng was swallowed back into the crowd on his back as they all began to change their cheers into yells of rage. The mob had come for her and she was ready as she held the bar in her hand again, spinning around, holding it against them all ready to strike back.

Her boots had been dipped in human blood and she painted her path on the steel.

She was ready. If these Marines and trainees thought they could beat her into submission, they would learn the mistake made of hundred worlds and a hundred thousand Covenant.

Hyper-lethal vector was right, and just before that human wave threw themselves upon her, a voice barked out.

"Enough!" Ryder had reappeared, and all those that could still stand had twisted around to him as he walked through them all. "What we have here is a combat veteran who has seen more time on the ground fighting than some of you have been alive. She is, bar none, the deadliest human to have ever existed. If you fight her she will not remember you save as a mote of wasted breath as she kills you with her bare hand."

The Admiralty had not heard that praise from Ryder yet, and to hear it now, said plainly to her as he himself entered the ring, it was concerning. Almost immediately they all knew what he was going to do: prove her case.

"What is that damn fool doing." Admiral Mikhailovich scorned.

"**Let them fight." **And with Hackett's words that was that.

"She has been here today so that she may be brought back to our standards, and all of you. All. Of. You. Will not ever be able to meet her mettle." He had yelled at every single Marine there as blood from Kai Leng's mouth dripped from the tip of the bar, his shattered teeth shards on the floor like broken glass. "She has survived things that you will only see in your nightmares, and so help me God, if you want to fight her, she will be in yours too."

An officer who had been on the ship for his own combat training spoke out. "She's been beating the shit out of all of us commander! Where are the MPs!"

Ryder had huffed. "I suppose this is part of the testing, lieutenant."

"Then let us at her!"

"If you fight her, she will _**kill you**_."

Perhaps that was why Ryder stepped into the ring himself.

The N7 stepped into the ring. Ryder. Mai noted the name, knew human history well. Better than some of her compatriots who had barely a grasp of Earth and the civilization that all of humanity had come from. There were similarities to the name of the astronauts that had paved the way into the cosmos. Silent as always she had dropped the bar, metal clanging against metal unkindly as she raised her fists, her head tilting, asking him if he really wanted to do this.

He nodded, ten paces away.

He was testing her. She was to prove herself to him.

She understood, sizing the man up, taking in a breath as she walked forward her arms not even up.

"Fight me."

That was when he pressed his own attack.

He went for her collar bone, grabbing her by her shirt as his other hand rode a punch into her gut, then her chest, and then over her face. She gave no sound as the sound of bone on flesh was heard, her head twisting only to right itself, looking dead on at Ryder, eye to eye, height to height. He let go of her collar to use both his hands, but she had caught his fists.

Every hit that he had delivered to her had risen a cheer from the crowd, but it did nothing to her. Not as she had taken his fists mid swing and held them, outstretching them away from his chest all so she could roll her head back and slam it into his. Her skull was that of steel, and he felt it as more blood had been spilled on the floor. She let go of his hands, only to slam a fist to the back of his head and walk away to her side of the ring, letting Ryder in his probable concussion stammer a bit before standing back up, lips and beard red and dripping.

In the time afforded to her she had cast her gaze out into the crowd, locking eyes with as many as possible. It was no coincidence some of the crowd had begun to leave, not wanting to see one of the first N7s be beaten into a pulp.

Ryder had come at her again, a series of punches pulled into her head, her sides, legs and wherever his fists could land. The sound of winds being broken filled the air was flesh was battered. All that Mai had responded with was to stand simply still and take it, barely giving way until Ryder had forced a punch hard enough for her to waver in step. She had fallen into that waver however, spinning around, right hand balled into a fist as she jumped into it, again slamming the top of Ryder's head with a punch before kicking him away.

She was silent still, eyes wide, her pupils black holes bearing through the N7.

Go into battle a be reborn. That was the way most N7s were made. Conflict changes people, the blood of someone revealed at the cusp of being killed or killing, all based on who they were facing. Once or twice the N7s in charge of new training regimen had wondered what would happen if every N7 had to go on a suicide mission for them to earn the stripe.

They wondered what would happen if they put the devil on the other side of the ring, and told the warfighters to go in.

The devil showed up, and she had been demeaned by people who would never understand her.

Ryder discarded his pain, let it course through him and all the damage it brought as he ran at her again, running a punch and a charge as Mai did nothing but stand there. His fist flew, knuckles first, right into the bottom of her face, dead center. Enough to bust her lips open, to bare her mouth, his knuckles cut open as he cut himself on the edge of her teeth.

Only one heel had moved as she took the punch, quickly to take that punching hand in her own grasp and to use it to throw Ryder on a ground, a foot on his back, his arm outstretched painfully.

It was as if she was bleeding from her mouth from the split lip, the socket which she lost a tooth from agitated and making it so she tasted blood in her mouth. This was nothing compared to Ryder however as his skull rocked against the floor when he was thrown down.

_**"Go." **_JD finally spoke to anyone and everyone, Anderson and Hackett nodding to the guards around them to call in and run toward the gym from the observation deck.

"You hate the Covenant, we know," Ryder spit up blood on the floor, laughing as Mai looked down at him, her face hidden behind a blank gaze. People had been emptying the room, fear befalling all of them, none dare intervene "But what about humanity? The way you fight us. What in your life brought you to this?"

What was to live for? What was to die for? The answer was the same. _**"Love."**_

* * *

The period to her answer was the sound of Ryder's arm breaking in five places.

When the MPs arrived with the Admiralty finally, Ryder had said nothing but this:

"She's _**fine**_."

For all the N trainees and Marines there, it was a learning experience that there was always someone far deadlier than them.

Anderson had looked immediately displeased when he found her again, arms raised above her head, the specks of blood on her face, her boots ruined by red. "What is the meaning of this!?"

She sucked in through her nose as she answered. "I was discriminated against and they said they would harm me. I believed them." She looked down at the swipes of blood all across that metal floor, like rays of violence left behind. "I'm sorry."

There was no apology there. Just formality. She didn't regret a damn thing.

Hackett hadn't run that fast ever since his last away mission, and that had been years ago, but he had to puff air through his nose as he looked at Anderson with a warning to him. If she had been under his command, she would have to be reeled in by him.

"We'll deal with this later." Hackett barked at any and all. "Everyone clear out!"

Those that remained had only ran as the medics arrived and took away anyone who couldn't on their own two feet. Kai Leng had been still screaming within himself, writhing with every movement of his to go and stand and keep fighting. His body would not let it happen though, not even as Ryder himself was carted away.

"Is this what I should suspect from a _**Spartan**_? Lieutenant Gul?" Hackett had growled. She said nothing but to clamp her jaw shut. She would've said yes otherwise. Looking her up and down once specks of blood had now covered her, her boots ruined. She didn't seem to mind.

JD had appeared in the shadow of the Admiralty, looking at the floor to see shards of teeth and splotches of blood. It was his judgement alone that Mai worried for, but he thought of himself unfit to judge. Not when he had her trust.

They locked eyes, and that was that.

"We still have testing to do. Come. We need to see what you can-" Hackett stopped to consider his words. "What you can really do."

As was a common occurrence she was led at guard and gun point down the halls of that training ship along with JD, past the locker room to prepare this time. Instead, however, to the self-proclaimed armory of the ship. JD, curiously, had already been in his black ODST armor.

When the door to the armory opened to a procession of computers, not rifles, all hooked up to a glass case holding her own armor, she understood. The armory was darkened and meek, seemingly, all light drawn on that glass case and armor she called her own. In a way seeing it had made her adrenaline and nerves settle.

"You didn't describe anything about this armor, Lieutenant Gul during your debriefs." Hackett had said, arms promptly behind his back as the techs all backed up, almost into the shadows as she stepped forward into the light of the armory: standing on its own, held up by a steel dummy meant for storing armor ten times less heavy. It strained in its holding of her armor: the outer pieces alone completing the deal when combined with the techsuit she had definitely worn ever since she had arrived on Reach till now.

Her black visor stared back at her, and only now she realized she had never the opportunity to see the armor, herself, like this.

Seven years. Seven years this armor had been hers, if not her. As in, this was who she was to UNSC: a suit of armor without a hint of the woman beneath its black and grey plates. She was a Spartan, and what that meant, it felt different than being human. That's what she knew, that's what she felt as she reached out and touched the chest piece, worn down and beaten by bullet and plasma fire. Once, long ago, where here fingers touched upon now over its heart, was where white lettering had denoted her designation: B312.

Pieces had been upgraded and replaced, her preferences as a Spartan that matured over the war made known as the armor changed with her. Gauntlets, boots, pads and plates had all been changed out over time based on the mission and her need until they had settled into roughly how it had been now. Even the helmet hadn't been original. The only item on there that had been sans her techsuit, was the chest piece.

Thick titanium alloy had kept its shape, saved her life time and time again, saved the trinket that she kept beneath her suit safe, let alone her.

The sparse times she had been able to look at her file, she had been amused at how exact the ONI observers had denoted her armor:

"_Spartan Mai-B312 has, in the current iteration of permutations pertinent to the Mark V MJOLNIR, has opted to strip down on accessories that are afforded to the MJOLNIR-equipped Spartans. Barring firmware updates from the Mark IV to the Mark V, her armor remains a B-class Mark V suit in configuration as of 2551. She has opted for no specialized shoulder pieces, instead going with MJOLNIR's bare frame (the same is true for her chest piece, thigh plates, and boots). Analysis of post-action reports and footage of B312 during Headhunter operations suggest high degree of mobility and agility preferred by her, which factors into suit options. Most modifications of her armor, therefore, rolls onto unofficial permutations otherwise known as "field" modifications, systematic of other Spartans in the field whom adjust their loadout to their liking."_

Of course, the knife was out of its holster, she mused, her hand going to the hardened sheath that had ridden her left hip. Her blade was kept there, almost as if it had been a sword. This was one of those field modifications that the rest of the report had went on about.

On her left hand had been a hardened case and bracer that acted as easy access to her data pad, the information within it probably worth the galaxy and more. Her own notes, maps, tactical data and a once constantly updated encyclopedia for what she herself hadn't already crammed in her head. Research data? The one-stop be-all for those researchers around her to unveil the secrets of the UNSC's science? Probably not.

Like a pair of suspenders two straps had rounded from her back and over her shoulders down to the belt: a harness left over from her time as a test pilot for the Sabre Project. Curiously, she'd been a natural pilot, compared to the rest of the Spartans. By what measure this had come about was probably a fluke, but because of this one of the calmest periods of her career had been the short four-month period where she acted as a test pilot on Reach for the Sabres.

Her assignment with Noble hadn't been her first time on Reach, far from it. It was probably to be her last however, at least how she knew it.

The harness was of sturdy, battle grade fabric, not easily broken. It was originally part of a flight suit, but she had instead used it to rig and play host to any number of packs or battle belts she needed, pouches and mag retention devices as she saw fit. It was similar to her own jury rigging now of her gear during the exercise, and it had come from experience. Many of the Spartan-IIs had been described as bolting or strapping gear on top of their armor, and she followed suit: fabric and polyester on metal creating an oddly utilitarian look to her MJOLNIR.

She rounded the back, looking to the rear of her helmet. She was used as test bed for many things as a Spartan that never existed, and one of them had been the neural lace at the back of the helmet, lining up with the back of her skull. The slot for an AI chip had been there, never used by her before, albeit tested all the same.

Without further ado she had reached out for it entirely, the helmet taken asides and put on a table.

_"Feet first up to the waist, chest, then arms, then your helmet. Just a general rule of thumb Three-Twelve." _A voice from her memory, from a Spartan-II.

It took an entire team to remove and put on MJOLNIR usually, though Six had known how to do it herself with nothing but her bare hands. So she donned her armor and became who she had been made into: a Spartan. The techs and engineers had been diligently been taking notes on every action of hers as the titanium shells were placed and locked into place around her body, compressing of air and latches locking filling the room as piece by piece, for nearly ten minutes, she put on her armor. This was a ritual to her, and in the end she was renewed as her helmet went on and JD had recognized who she was.

In her helmet the motion tracker had registered only one man as green: JD. The chip in his head had made his IFF signature green while the rest of those in the room appeared yellow.

She cut an imposing figure to all but the ODST, who only stood, arms at his hips, looking up at her. She looked back down, visor to visor. He depolarized his, and, surprisingly, she did the same. For the first time they saw each other behind those panes of glass.

Her eyes were blue. Blue like the hottest of fires, sharp, painful. His eyes were dull tired browned over like dirt itself.

"I could probably use your helmet and it'll link up… and vice versa." She said, elsewhere a scientist was furiously noting it silently. She unclasped her helmet again briefly, holding it out to him as he did the same. It was something worth doing, they both imagined. Perhaps they'd be out on an op together and one of their helmets were seriously damaged, necessitating sharing.

Surely, they wouldn't split them apart.

The Mark V helmet JD held was heavier than the ODST helmet, turning it over in his hand as Mai unceremoniously clad his black helmet onto her head. She smelled him as it was slid on, the HUD aligning to her eyes shortly. The man smelt of sweat and salt, earthy and dirt. Her nose had been overly sensitive, the ODST helmet lacking the inherent filtration systems that hers had. Still, it was a smell she could deal with as she looked around, flipping through the more, ironically, Spartan VISR modes as he only began to slide hers on.

It was pitch black before he had let the software within adjust to a new user, her dark visor going both ways until it recognized that it was being worn, clearing up and his vision going awash with real color and then the Spartan before him.

It was odd, to both of them, to see someone else don their respective helmets.

The HUDs were the same however, standardization easing them both into, in a way, each other's heads.

JD's thumb had went to the manual flashlight control won the helmet, finding it, flashing it. Mai had done the same before taking off his helmet, exchanging again. "Some Spartans talk like that, you know." he tilted his head at her comment. "Non-verbal communique."

He tilted his head at her as he put on his helmet again.

"Could teach you." She said quietly.

With a few short nods, building up to one definite, concrete one, he had decided he liked the sound of that.

"We still have a few more scenarios to run." Anderson promptly reminded them.

Mai nodded. "I need a weapon."

Anderson nodded with a smirk. "Right this way."

Somehow, and JD was one of the few that had done this, he had stopped her, his hands touching her armor and feeling the wear and tear of the Covenant and the Insurgency almost burn his fingers. It held her shoulder, keeping her still as she looked at him without the shade of her VISR.

"You know, Mai," Her name was odd to hear on people's tongues, so used to codenames and callsigns. "My Dad taught me not to speak, but to listen."

His hands had left her, but in reality, she had still been held by him.

"Why?" She tilted her helmet clad head. He crossed his arms, looking at Anderson as he walked away and expected them to follow.

"Everyone you will ever meet will know something you don't." In Anderson's footsteps, JD became like a shadow. "Maybe it goes for something like fighting too."

What they learned from Mai using the MJOLNIR armor would keep any who had been witness to her awake for months, years, warfare redefined because of her. Spartans, ODSTs, MJOLNIR, Misriah Armories, ONI Materials Group, names that were not yet understood fully but gave the Alliance an idea of what combat evolved look like.

* * *

Ryder defended her as he was led into medbay. Begrudgingly, but he did, and all Anderson and Hackett could do was take his word for it. JD was at her side before she could even imagine where she would be able to go without raising hell. Marines didn't take kindly to when some of their own were brutalized. If he were a good ODST he'd be shooting daggers at her. In all of their existence now, he had been the only ODST in the entire universe.

He decided his own rules now, just as the Alliance tried to find rules to hold Mai to.

They had been technically civilians, and yet technically military at the same time, and so what rule book they could be thrown down at if they had an infraction was a conundrum. They did not exist as people, no history afforded to them. After the exercises were through, every single test given and recorded, after their armor was shed again and left alone on the ship to wait arrival to Earth, the Admiralty had reconvened to decide their ultimate fate.

As if she was looking for trouble Mai had appeared at the med-bay, looking through the window to see what had become of the men and women she had made pay for their indiscretions. She never was afforded time to look at what she had done. There was often no need to during a mission.

Morbid curiosity that manifested in her appearing as a ghost to one of the men in the beds, hopped up on pain meds and screaming that she had been there to finish him off as the nurses and medics tried to settle him.

She made to leave without otherwise being noticed, her bad for getting such a response.

When she turned around she almost thought it had been a trainee about to send a sucker punch her way, but she was mistaken as she tensed and relaxed in the span of Spartan Time. JD was given the same fatigues she was, his UNSC Marine layers gone.

He had dug a chain out of his shirt. UNSC tags. They let him keep that at least.

He flashed a thumb up at her, and she nodded in response, motioning her hands for him to lead the way. He nodded thoughtfully. He had found a place to bide their time at.

"Came to say sorry?" He drew her away from the window.

She shook her head. "Just making sure I didn't do anything permenant and, uh-" she tongued the empty socket in her mouth. "I wanted to see if they could get me a new tooth."

"Mind if I…?" He asked quietly. She rose an eyebrow at him, but relented, nodding. Slowly, as if approaching a hurt animal, JD had reached out with a hand to hold her chin, opening her mouth as he had moved closer to her, looking into her maw. "Lateral incisor." She struggled to say as he held her mouth open and he looked up to see the socket.

He was looking to see if it had required any treatment, having been this long without getting it looked at properly. For all the medics and techs had looked at them for, their own well-being wasn't exactly in their purview.

Fingers had left her chin and back to his side. "Biofoam doesn't taste that bad you know. For injuries in the mouth I was told to just put a dollop in water and then swish and spit." The only biofoam left in that universe was either in her own suit reserves or in JD's bag. "Medigel" was the Alliance's standard all purpose medical applicant. A little more useful, perhaps, given the benefits of it being a gel and not foam, but the usage was the same. "Did they do that to you or…?"

"The Elite." The Crimson one they were carted away with. She wondered if he was dead now in all honesty. Then again it was normal for her to think constantly about dead Covenant, even if she did fight humans. Disdainfully, she looked back at the window, seeing only an obtuse angle as they got out of the field of view, the white lights of the bay illuminating the otherwise darker corridors. "Sometimes I wonder if it's worth fighting for humanity sometimes." JD would doubt if he would've heard this from another Spartan, however she would know best humanity. She had fought them more than anyone in the UNSC. She was the original vision of the Spartan-IIs, fulfilled.

He'd heard the same before, heard it from men on the end of their rope of young ODSTs after their first drop: faced with the rest of their lives of endless war against a superior foe. He wasn't a bonafide field medic, nor was he a people person, a psychologist who knew what made people tick, but he was, undoubtedly, human. He wondered if she would feel…

With one index finger, and Mai had barely caught it, he had made a circle in the air. Tactical hand signaling: follow me. She nodded.

In Alliance uniforms, the only detail particularly out of place had been Mai's stature. Taller than most females, something JD himself was not used to. Still passing by men and women they had been none the wiser. They blended in well, but the guards posted in the corridors on duty had undoubtedly be briefed on them, as was why they all looked them and made known that they were being watched.

It was fine, however, they got their privacy.

_"All crews, final approach through the Charon Relay imminent. Docking stations in ten minutes."_

The intercom had sounded off, and all the crew had seemed to pick up, busy, going to their duty stations as Mai felt in her feet the abrupt shift of FTL to normal flight.

Walking through a door labeled "viewing deck", they saw the stars that had been too familiar.

The constellations were correct, the arrangement of stellar bodies, they all clued into where they were now.

The fact that Pluto had said hello and goodbye in that giant windowed room, facing outward and offering an unbeatable view of the cosmos, also held no lies.

Sol.

A system, remarkable, she had never been to as the gravity of their arrival finally took hold of her, walking right up to the railing of the deck. It was like a airport concourse, the giant window floor to ceiling putting them at the mercy of the view.

Planets, to some colonists, heard only in folk tails had blazed by like a montage. Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars…

No sign of the UNSC orbital installations or the shipyards that helped sustain the war effort, only nailing even more and more evidence to a theory JD and Mai had only taken as truth. Whatever their thoughts, it was stayed when the third planet to the sun had been approached as if nothing at all.

He'd never stepped on foot on the planet.

Born, in the galactic view of scale, a step away from the homeworld, seeing it everyday as a child, he had never gone onto it.

Earth.

Seven Continents. Seven Seas. The birthplace of humanity, shared cross the stars. As a young child, JD had seen weary servicemen who had never seen Earth before come to Luna for one reason or another and, when the planet rose into view, seen their breath taken away. Earth: a place worth fighting for. All that was right in the heavens made real as humanity's first home stared right back at them. It rejuvenated those tired soldiers then, and it rejuvenated JD now for a war he had been lost to. Green and blue, a jewel only imitated in far off systems. The viewing deck's window had been large and wide, and they were alone now, the entirety of Earth now in its frame, the colors of the world painting them all in brilliant bright light that soothed. They stood side by side as the planet rose in front of them into view, silence was all they needed as JD realized something else:

He looked to Mai, and for the first time in her life she stood in awe. Her deep blue eyes were swallowed by the sight, her face illuminated heavenly by a home that every human shared: Total awe in the presence of heaven.

For one moment JD allowed himself to look upon her fondly. The light of Earth had fit her lovingly, white swirling clouds in the atmosphere beautifully swept like a painting.

"I'd only seen pictures. Vidtapes. _I didn't think_-" She trailed off, consideration on her lips, the world in her eye. "Is this what I've been fighting for my whole life?"

All the ODST could do was only nod. Earth. Humanity. The life of every man, woman, and child. All of it was summed up, as a historical scientist said once, in a pale blue dot.

Humanity had taken something from her, as much as the Covenant had. She never knew how she exactly reconciled her situation with how she was today, and, in all honesty, she had come around to think that she never did find peace in herself. Only when war distracted her did she feel okay.

There was no war here.

Only an ODST that got caught up with her.

"In the grand scheme of things: yeah."

Earth was grand as it stared back at them with the blue light.

The light of Earth, her presence, it was a place of healing for many a weary Marine. Even if this Earth was different, it welcomed them all the same as their children.

"Do you have a home, Mai?" JD asked, the moon off to the corner of the view. Luna was always as steadfast as a rock as ever.

New Jerusalem, once, a long time ago. Then Onyx. Not really homes but places she had been birthed. "No." she answered. "But I suppose this is my home now…." Her words trailed, looking at JD in the light of Earth. "Why'd you bring me here?"

_I just wanted to see the look on your face._

That's what he wanted for some selfish reason: To know that she was human, despite being a Spartan. He didn't say that though. He shrugged.

"How often did you see… this?" She posed another question.

JD had to count in his head, and that by itself had depressed him far more than he would've let on. Even now, this wasn't their Earth, their Luna.

"Last time was seven years ago, when I had to return and bury Mom."

His first tour had been as a UNSC Marine, deployed immediately to the front to a dense, jungle planet of Persei. Less than a month posted there, the Covenant had come, and he had been left behind by the evacuation efforts as his unit was left behind enemy lines before the planet was glassed. There a trend had been started: he was sole survivor of his unit as the planet was burned around him, he hunkering in a mineral mine, and then walking the wastes for three months until he had linked up with other surviving colonists.

No one to talk to. Nothing to do but to survive and sleep until he could've lifted Cole Protocol and radio in for an evac for the rest of the survivors. If it hadn't been for the fact there was a group he might've just been left there.

In those three months he had been unceremoniously listed as MIA, and as he was reintegrated he was given one of the only news that would've gotten any UNSC servicemember off the front:

His mother had died.

Hearing her son had been MIA on a glassed planet, it was nothing less than lethal to her. Her heart couldn't bear the thought of either her son being dead, burned or buried alive by glass, or left to die by the UNSC.

His father had been dead a year before JD had joined, and his mother had lived a full life: reconciliations that JD tried to bring to himself as he brought her to her grave on Luna, a wreck of a man. That was the last time he had seen Earth before he left it behind to go fight a losing war.

He was now the last of his family, lone survivor of his company on Persei, and wherever the Marine, then ODST, went, he would be the Ishmael.

Now he found himself with a Lone Wolf who now knew what Earth looked like.

"I never thought I'd see it again."

His eyes traced the surface, looking for space elevators where there were none: London, New York, Mumbai, Cairo, Seoul, New Mombasa… When Earth was the only thing in the sky as a child, he memorized it well.

Those space elevators had been for cargo, and for people, leaving Earth to go out to the stars. To them: billions of people had left Earth, entire worldly populations gone to the frontier and colonies to seek a home beyond Earth. As they learned however here the Alliance simply hadn't yet been capable of that. Spiritually to the ODST and Spartan, Earth was humanity. If Earth had fallen to the Covenant, then so to would humanity in due time if the two were not already hand in hand. To the Alliance however, Earth _**was**_ humanity, the entirety of human population still held on the pale blue dot in the sea of stars.

It meant that the Alliance held Earth so much dearer than the displaced soldiers could, and yet, in that moment, they understood that privately. The Alliance was a humanity not of their own, but a humanity still.

"Do we still fight for Earth?" Mai asked aloud.

She was a hyper-lethal vector. A tool. She needed to be ordered and pointed toward a goal.

JD could not answer that question. It was too big for him to answer to her: she a monster made of man. He knew the answer he had however.

So they stood in each others company, letting the cold air over them, pretending that it was the cosmic winds came from Earth, basking in a warmth that was not felt on skin, nerves, or even the heart. It was that of human nature.

The only thing that could bring them out of their silence was the sound of a door opening, and upon seeing who it was, snapping to attention.

"Lieutenant Gul, be aware you are on very thin ice. If it wasn't for Commander Ryder's word you would be written up and court martialed for attempted murder." It was Anderson, the man storming, but reserved as he approached. Behind him had been Admiral Hackett, his face blank and reserved, stiff. "We will press charges if you pull a stunt like that again, whether instigated or not. You put several N-program members out of action permanently today and, if it wasn't for the fact we are going to do what we're about to do, you'd be facing Leavenworth." They both raised their eyebrows at the commander, and he nodded as he understood the confusion.

He took a breath, calming himself. The talks he had come from had been brief, inconclusive, but emotional, so unbefitting of the Admiralty.

"Sir?" Mai awaited.

"I'm sorry we've been pushing you so hard, with the tests and exercises." They hadn't, both admitted to themselves. They'd been to war for nearly an entire decade and survived, and that was nothing like the simulations presented. Still it was what they wanted, and they fought and danced as the Alliance wanted. "Though you've made clear that you're both qualified, beyond qualified, for the Alliance's top grades."

They were being commended, so they continued to stand straight.

"You operate like only someone who knows what it's like to be in a prolonged war, and, given your circumstances, we expect nothing less."

Hackett straightened his mouth, nodding. He cocked his head one way for a second toward Earth. In one dip of his chin he acknowledged the two, and they slackened their forms. Anderson continued, "I cannot speak for your UNSC, your Earth Gov, your… Earth, but I hope I can speak for your humanity."

That statement seized their attention truly, as if they were being called back with an echo.

The Admiral saw them slacken, just a little more, finally speaking. "We came here to reassure you that, despite everything you've been through, humanity owes you both a debt that we cannot repay, and we cannot understand."

JD stirred. "Permission to speak freely, Admiral?"

"Permission granted."

"_**You**_ owe us no debt." He stressed. "No one owes me anything."

For all that had been done to Mai, she agreed, nodding in agreement.

"You fought in a war that, if we were faced with, I don't think we would've survived for as long as you have. Your actions, both of you, are worth of praise and recognition on behalf of any humanity." Hackett explained, truly. He wasn't appealing to them, wasn't trying to win them over, but at the end of the day whether or not they would be abused because of their circumstances or let free Mai and JD were both this:

Soldiers of humanity.

"We fought for survival, and if humanity is ever in need we would be honored again to serve." JD knew the words he chose.

The ODST spoke with such dedication it was admirable. It was honor to all those who had fallen besides him, leaving him to remember who they were and what they had sacrificed all in the name of giving humanity another day to fight.

"You are human, Admiral." Mai finally spoke in a rasp. "That is all the reason we need." Her face softened, showing the dents and scars that had marked her face from a war she fought voluntarily on a level that no one should've. Yet despite this, she would've continued her duty until the day she died.

The nature of how now, with the Alliance, it hung over them all like the air before a storm.

Anderson looked at them with a hint of sadness: "You have no history. No family. No home or belongings. You never existed to us until 48 hours ago. You have to understand that what we are going to propose to you now, might not be what you expect…"

"…Are we being drafted sir?" JD had been almost scared to ask.

Anderson steeled his face. "Your existence has been declared by the Admiralty and the Prime Minister as classified. You are now humanity's deepest secret and because of that… for now, we have to keep you close."

"You'll be assigned to Captain Anderson until further notice, and we create identities for you that will help integrate you into this society-"

"We can't go back." Mai said to herself aloud. No more war. No more Covenant. No more ONI or UNSC or Insurrection. Their lives gone. It felt wrong when so many back on Reach, in the galaxy, were still dying beneath the Covenant onslaught. "Will you not try to help us go back?"

She knew the impossibilities of that statement, knew the statistical likelihood compounded with all the new factors that came from a world that did not use Slipspace.

She just wanted to hear them say it.

Hackett and Anderson uneasily looked to each other before Anderson spoke. "We would do everything we can to help you, but given the details or your arrival here, it was a one-way street."

So that was that.

"As I was saying," Hackett continued. "You've seen enough fighting to warrant a discharge, benefits, a quiet place to get settled. It would be irresponsible of us however to just let you go. Not without preparing you. Not without having all of our bases covered."

Anderson squinted his eyes, the light of Earth silhouetting the pair, and, briefly, he saw the tiredness that betrayed both of their resoluteness. He could hardly himself imagine it: to be at war their entire lives and, just when they got away, accidentally no less with the want to go back and finish the fight, they were told instead to maybe fight a different war.

It exhausted him just thinking about it.

_**"We are not at war." **_He blurt out.

Peace.

Everything they were taught, as an ODST and as a Spartan, spoken to them like gospel from the likes of Admiral Cole, Chief Mendez, Doctor Halsey, Colonel Ackerson, or Lieutenant Commander Ambrose, they were never taught to live in peace.

That realization scared them to their bones.

"Anderson will take care of you on his vessel, getting you oriented while familiarizing yourself in an environment you might recognize: the military. It will be quiet, discrete, and while you will be expected to attend to duty stations and regulations, you will unlikely be in a position where you have to fight."

Anderson nodded in agreement. "For ease of integration, you'll both be signed on as MCPOs with the Navy." For JD, it was certainly a kick up in rank, so he was shocked as he physically hung on his heels and face writ with surprise. "Don't look so surprised, Durante. You've been in active service long enough, and have enough experience, to take it."

Mai responded similarly, her mouth twisting into a odd line of discomfort. MCPO, she thought unbelieving. She was a Lieutenant in the UNSC Army, to be fair. She could handle the rank. What had made her uncomfortable was the fact she was to be given the rank that was held by one man in particular. She was now a Master Chief.

Master Chief Petty Officer Durante and Master Chief Petty Officer Gul.

"Will you take our lead on this?" Hackett asked as kindly as he could.

JD sucked in air to his chest, steeling himself as he had dealt again with a decision he had made at 17 (With his parents' permission). What choice did he have anyway, he reasoned, and he would rather do it on his own terms.

"I am who I am sir. By the grace of God."

"And what is that?"

"_**A Marine**_." He held out his hand which Anderson shook strongly. "I'd be honored to enlist."

"And you? Lieutenant?"

She seemed overwhelmed, not only by the proposal, but by how fast JD had taken it. Helljumpers had hardly paused when they fell, and she could know that was true by the quiet man besides her.

"I'd hate to do this alone." He spoke to her, quietly, turning toward her with eyes that glistened with stars. He was a kind man. She knew this just by his voice. He never shouted in his life if his life didn't depend on it. Perhaps, she theorized, it was because of his own upbringings on the moon that seemed so close, yet so far away: seeing men and women who were broken themselves be locked up from society.

He had empathy for her. He wanted to know her name, after all, and that alone meant something.

His words were all chosen and important and they were now asking her to come along for the ride.

Anderson had nodded as JD tried to convince her. "Given both of your… situations, we'd have to keep you together, of course."

She was a Lone Wolf, and yet…

Wolves were not meant to hunt alone.

Against her better instinct, her training, her clearance and sound reasoning-

She offered a hand to JD and the ODST feared that she was saying goodbye. Her bare palm, oddly, was soft, welcoming, warm. The techsuit spared her damage to her hands and he felt it as they shook once before his hand became clammed between both her hands, a thumb running over his reassuringly.

The hand was pulled away and then offered to Anderson, and, almost too quickly, she had shaken his hand once before she stood rimrod straight, hands behind her back. JD emulated by training alone.

"I'll submit my application. I will serve. Give me my mission."

That was when the Human-Covenant War ended for them. Thirty years of pain ended inconclusively by a mistake. Taken away, and nothing they could do: the war they fought had been finished and now they were afforded something that none of them had experienced before. It was spoken in memory, fought for by the blood of millions. Only distantly, like a fantasy or dream that predated everything, **peace** was now given to them.

* * *

If taken out of context, a woman lugging a dead, dusty brown bear about four times her size into town would've been cause for concern, especially since she herself was bloodied and carrying a rifle.

This was Alaska however, so it happened every so often as a sky ski that belonged to one of the snowed-in town's residents pulled up alongside her, the road into the town kept for aesthetics' sake as opposed to utility. It didn't help a layer of fresh snow had been on it. It was one of those towns left behind during the rapid modernization of Earth come the 2100s, however the future had made its way there by government municipalities and services such as the police force.

She lugged the bear by a sled, dragging it with all her might and stubbornness.

"Uhhh hi there." The man had said, a flash of his holographic badge stating he was the sheriff.

"Huff, huff- huh hi!" The woman responded cheerfully as she let down her hood and face mask, tired from the trek. "My name's Jane! _**Jane Shepard**_!" She bit her gloved hand to take it off, offering it to the sheriff as he dismounted. The elderly sheriff took it as he looked for the tag on the bear that denoted she did… whatever she did, legally.

There were a few stab marks, bullet holes, and ripping and tearing, but there was a tag.

"You alright there miss?" He asked out of concern.

Shepard could only smile and shake her head. "Nah. This big guy got the jump on me, but it's okay. Barely a scratch." It was a bold faced lie based the bandages and tourniquet that had been applied over her white camo suit, but she was chipper enough. "Could you point me toward the taxidermist?"

The sheriff could only look at her awkwardly and nodded. "I'll do you one better. Hook up your sled and I'll take you there."

For her new posting on the SSV Normandy, she was more than happy to have a rug made out of a bear for the crew quarters, so she was all smiles as she thanked the sheriff and took off: the proof of her skill and tenacity proved in the body of a beast.

She had made a habit of killing monsters. Batarians, Thresher Maws, whatever the galaxy could throw at her. If she could survive Akuze, she could've survived anything, she thought. It was more appropriate however after Elysium and then Torfan, that instead she could_** kill**_ anything.

Potato potato, she reasoned.

Whatever it meant however, she was alive today, and she more than happy with that.


	6. 0-6: Single Step - Great Journey

Two weeks. That's all that they had to discover, on their own, the measure of this universe and everything that they had to take as simple, basic fact. They weren't given leave, but it was something similar as Anderson had accompanied them down on a shuttle from the Montenegro.

"So, we know that you weren't exactly Earthborn Chief Durante." He spoke to the uneasy JD, given a change of civilian clothes. "However, we can reasonably expect that your Luna had a certain demographic of immigrants, same as any other colonies. What were you?"

The shuttle's path had depended on it.

His leg had vibrated in anxiousness. He was more used to breaking atmosphere in a pod, not a shuttle. The longer you stayed in the air during the drop, the longer it gave the Covenant time to shoot down a pod.

He stumbled for an answer. "Uh, well. I don't know much. I'm the second generation of my family born on the moon…" He led off. Luna was mankind's first experiment in colonization of beyond Earth in the 2080s, and, despite this, wasn't exactly the most ideal location. The Lunar States and Cities were more often than just giant cities, sprawling beneath its surface and in the giant craters: sealed from the vacuum. Efforts to give the Moon an atmosphere had once been talked about, but the war had overrun such ideas in favor of defense initiatives. Here, the Systems Alliance had been following the same steps in local terraforming of the moon. "My Nona, she told me that we immigrated from West Virginia."

"So you're an American?" Anderson picked out. The United Republic of North America had been a big societal basis for many colonies, Luna among them.

Just based on how he talked alone: yes, he was an American. He nodded, running the flannel sleeves of his change of clothes up his arm.

Mai had been given something similar, albeit it had taken longer to acquire. Finding clothes that would fit her had been an issue. Feeling comfortable in it was something she also was having trouble with. For the first time in her life ever since she had been a _child_, she wore the clothes not meant for Spartans or the military. It culminated in track pants and a hoodie, and, although not the classiest assortment, it fit her.

Their lives had been eviscerated and then replaced in a heartbeat, new points, concerns, reevaluations of their situation given to them like enemy fire. All they could do was react.

Only now however did thing seem to slow down.

Anderson had typed a message to the pilot on his orange omnitool, reminding both of the passengers he rode with that they too had their own now. Manifesting in a cuff they wore on their left arm, omnitools had become the defacto utility tools in the galaxy. In use by humans and aliens alike. On top of getting used to the interface, they had to get used to another factor:

Humanity had gone to the stars and, instead of drawing the card of the UEG, they found aliens willing to _**co-exist**_.

* * *

"I'll submit my application. I will serve. Give me my mission."

Mai had said this with all the intensity she could.

Hackett raised his hand as he took over for Anderson. "Not so fast." There was a smile behind it though. "There will be a process to this. Things need to be taken care of and both of you will need to be brought up to speed on the norms of this society, along with integration at the very least into the Alliance."

Both of them nodded almost in sync, understanding, Mai reeling herself in.

"But there is one thing I need to make clear, Private, Lieutenant." He used their actual ranks and they tightened up again. "Mankind has not been victim to a genocidal war against any alien species in its history. We have gone to war with some, yes, and occasionally our military does get into scuffs with pirates and rebels, just as your UNSC once did, but we have been given a different plate than you."

It was a word often talked about by those who had lived before Harvest, before that infamous message was transmitted claiming humanity's death, but once upon a time _**peace**_ was the rule of the known galaxy for humanity. It was something the two of them had never known until now.

"We understand Admiral." JD stated.

"What about the Covenant that were brought with us?" Mai asked fiercely, still wary. "What has happened to them?"

Hackett blew a breath. "Right now Altis has become quarantined. Nothing in or out, and the information regarding the Covenant species is under an information blackout until we and the power that be find a way to respond. God knows we can't keep it under wraps for long, but by that time we'll have a story to tell coherently from our end."

"But what about _**them**_, Admiral." The Spartan pressed on.

Hackett adjusted his cap. "We've sustained casualties pacifying them, a few dozen men, but it appears a leader of the survivors has called for a ceasefire as long as we remain out of sight. Talks are beginning. Those in custody we're running through the usual first contact protocols, we've done this before mind you. We've translated the language of the species known as Sangheili-"

"The Elites?" Mai seemed surprised.

"Yes." Hackett answered back. "Those in custody seem to understand that we're not the UNSC. Some of them have even begun piecing together that they ended up in another universe, but conversations are tense and, unfortunately, they're still dealing with humans. Fighting has ceased, and that's good enough for now."

The fire in Mai's eyes returned as JD was almost, equally, unsure. It was the Covenant that this humanity was dealing with. _**The Covenant**_. "Do not trust them for one second. They've killed so many of us I don't think it matters you're different."

Hackett straightened his lips and his own stance, narrowing his eyes. "We are different, Lieutenant. If we need to pacify them absolutely we will, but we will give them a chance here."

"Respectfully sir-"

"Do I make myself clear?" Hackett's voice hardened, and the soldier in both of them returned as they straightened their forms.

JD answered for both of them as Mai sucked in a breath. They had no choice. "Sir. Yes sir."

Hackett nodded. "We're still continuing to scavenge through the debris field over and on Altis, but you have to understand that you will have to operate alongside our standards eventually, consider most of the gear you're familiar using not in your frame anymore."

Mai had hardened at that. "You're going to have to make an exception to that Admiral."

"Your armor?"

He knew what Mai was referring to as she nodded, JD following up. "Respectfully, sir, I'd like to at least be in possession of my BDU and armor. If Alliance technology is not able to be applied to it, so be it, but the ODST battle armor has served me well these last few years."

It took a moment of nodding, but Hackett wouldn't be the one to talk. It'd have to be the engineers and quartermasters that would decide that.

Mai had almost been urgent in her words. "Sir, my armor is what many in the UNSC consider the pinnacle of human combat technology. Without it I lose much of my combat effectiveness. I'd be willing to put my life on the assumption that my armor is superior to anything you would be fielding. You know what it can do."

If everything she said was true, he was in no place to argue. They'd seen her first hand become bored as she survived an onslaught of Marines and N-candidates wanting to get back at her. MJOLNIR simply wasn't fair.

"We'll have to see, but both your gear is currently going through HAZMAT and cataloging. I'll give the order to retrofit them if possible and delivered to you during your deployment with Anderson, but I will hold no promises."

"Minimal retrofitting, please, sir." JD was, secretly, a little amused that Mai had been begging on behalf of her armor. He couldn't judge however. Energy shields, if he or any number of his fellow ODSTs had had them, he might've seen a lot more live… That being said he knew energy shields were not the only thing MJOLNIR gave her.

Hackett nodded again, but on the uptake, he returned a statement. The two squared their forms. "The Admiralty has unanimously declared that, until further notice, your backgrounds, who you are, where you've been and what you've done, is classified. Nothing about the Covenant, the UNSC, your training, your armor, or your augmentations Mai, is allowed to be known by those without clearance. Is that understood?"

JD had rattled in his mind for a moment. Had he already broken this new veil of secrecy by having the knowledge she told him? He knew that augmentations had been done to her for the sake of battle. Her bones were coated by metal and her very veins so different they fired off faster than their own bodies could handle without even more augmentations to compensate.

For what little she had let on to him during their time on Arcturus, he was now her confidant.

"Sir, yes sir."

"You will be issued a cover stories. A life lived here. You will be active military personnel in the Systems Alliance Navy, and you will have a command to answer to. But if your nature is ever questioned, and if your background is ever needed, you will answer only to me through Captain Anderson. Is _that_ understood?"

JD allowed himself to tilt his head at Mai, and, uncomfortably, if only because she was breaking form, did she look back into the man's eyes. He was scared. He wasn't in fear, but he was scared, unsure. Ironic that it was being at peace that was unnerving him now.

"Sir, yes sir." They finally answered.

Whatever grievances they had, it could not be allowed.

"Then your mission is this: Get acquainted with the Alliance, our society, make your transition as seamless as possible, and when you are ready, we will take you in as best we can."

* * *

"And Chief Gul, where'd you hail from? If you know?"

A strike of embarrassment had erupted in her core. Questions of herself she could not input in. She could've told anyone the trajectory and adjustments needed to land a 4000 meter shot from a stationary Hornet hovering in place to a human sized target. She could've plotted slipspace courses on her own with nothing but a calculator and pen and paper. What she couldn't tell people about, not out of classified information or other secrecy arrangements, but rather pure lack of knowledge, were items like what her favorite food was, her measurements, whether she knew how to drive anything that hadn't been designed to kill, if she had any money to her name; and, most disheartening, who had been her family.

She knew she was _**brown**_. She knew she could reasonably guess she was ethnically Arab from her name and appearance.

She didn't know anything else.

Not even her mother's name.

Her silence was that of being unable to answer. That much JD could tell as she bit her lip from the inside. Finally, she did give one. "I am… unable to give that information, sir."

Anderson had gleamed hints of the unusual social ticks that Mai had. They screamed at him an answer that he himself was unable to cleanly give: She was developmentally incomplete. Not mentally challenged, far from it, but rather no one had taught her how to live a normal life.

"Okay. There's an Alliance military post and recruiting station along the American-Canadian border. In New York. We're taking you there. I presume the American states remained the same in your reality?" JD nodded, he was the only one that would know. Mai had, vaguely, heard of "New York" before from a Marine speaking loudly in a ship she was posted to one deployment. "Well it's right along Niagara Falls. Would you be okay spending two or so weeks there while we attend to preparations for the Normandy? Given your orders you should be able to keep busy."

They couldn't say no.

This shuttle was fast. Pelicans were bulky, well armored, gunned up, but all too easily shot down by intercepting Covenant fighters of anti-air. The Kodiak had its merits. The Alliance tech, as so far known to them, had its merits

Mai had turned over her left arm until the chip in her bracer detected it was being looked at, the omnitool lighting up orange as it showed its blank home screen. Her datapad embedded in her armor had been more familiar, more utilitarian in its design, but evidently this was more civilian and privately designed than the blue screen she used.

"This carries my ID, biometrics, and a fabricator?" She moved her arm to show Anderson. He nodded.

"Main interface device in all the galaxy. Do anything from hack weaponry and machines, to surfing the Extranet." He affirmed, flashing his own.

Mai had curiously looked it over, feeling her fingers physically touch the device as if it had been a hard, physical object. With enough force she had been able to press through, but the sense of tactile feel was impressive. Only on ops well behind enemy lines as a Headhunter did she see Prophets and their Prelates use such equipment that had used such "hardlight". It hadn't been Covenant technology. It had been the technology of their gods. She overheard one of handlers, so many missions ago, mention, off hand, during an object recovery op their name: _**Forerunner**_.

The galaxy, as she knew it, had its fair share of secrets. Too busy with the war, she had doubted humanity put much into such efforts. She would never know however. Her galaxy was gone, and any mystery she had a lick of, would never be answered. The end of the war, the fate of Reach and Noble Team: all would be hidden from her for all time now.

JD opened his omnitool up, slowly, but surely, opening up a map of the shuttle's path down. Both of them had felt the shuttle break atmosphere, and its current trajectory put it right where Anderson said it would be: on the New York-Canadian border. There was a landmark on the omnitool's screen that had been identifiable to him: Niagara Falls.

"Permission to speak freely?" JD had asked, closing the omnitool. Anderson nodded, honestly put off by the man's rigid adherence to brevity. "I'd hate to feel like glorified tourists, sir. Especially on your- I mean our homeworld."

Anderson gave a small smile. "Oh don't worry. A generation has gone and lived without Earth, you wouldn't be the first. Hell, we even have some Turians and Asari here."

They were both reasonable people when they realized that fact: No one had outright confirmed it till moments after they enlisted, but they had picked up small details, pictures and photos, words and spoken comments that there was another something that they had to account for.

There were more aliens there. Aliens not related to the Covenant. Aliens that didn't want humanity dead.

If they hadn't any ill-will against humanity, what were they to say? It was an impossible thought to them that there were aliens that were not on a war path to end them, but it was something they would have to deal with in the coming weeks. They didn't kid themselves, privately, they didn't know how they would react when seeing one of those aliens native to that galaxy.

They would have to play it by ear, one step at a time as they felt the shuttle slow down to a crawl, its door open while still in flight and Anderson raise himself to hold one of the bars on the roof for stability. What was revealed to JD and Mai had been a city not unlike those they had known among the colonies. A little more glass, a little more steel, the design aesthetics. The cold nip of air, a bright, blue sunny sky.

Mai had leaned over, peering out, seeing the landscape of a continent that had yet to see galactic war. She saw the dirt of Earth for the first time, right where it should've been.

JD would've thought it funny to hear her thoughts on Earth dirt. He once had dropped on a colony at the far reaches of human space, and there, in some visitor center, there had been a vial of dirt that had come from Germany, Earth.

That was the measure of how importance this planet was to some.

The city hadn't been as big as say, New Alexandria or Arcadia, but it was a city nonetheless, with an oddly familiar name to JD. No sky scrapers, but there were towers, seemingly built over the shell of 20th century buildings. "City's called Buffalo. Ever hear of it?"

JD rocked his head back and forth, crudely giving an answer. "Buffalo Wings?"

Anderson chuckled. "Something like that."

The Kodiak shuttle was something like the Pelican, the general purpose, and in this case, military shuttle of humanity. What the Pelican was to them, the Kodiak was to Anderson, Mai had gandered a look, her height just barely coming opposed to the ceiling. Her blood had heated and cooled in one moment, her mind fighting its wiring. It felt as if she had been going to the now open side of the shuttle to open fire below. Her better angels had won however as all she did was look out, look down, and see what a human city did when it hadn't been in the process of being attacked.

Miniatures of humans, of people, just going about their day as airborne cars flew into sky lanes, leaving the ground blissfully clear of everything but men and women and children living the lives promised to them.

Loose strands of hair fluttered in the wind as she looked down to see faces. Her sight was good enough, even fifty or a hundred feet up, to discern features. That this was no trick. That this was Earth, and there were humans here.

"We've made arrangements for you to stay at a hotel adjacent to the recruiting post, there it is now." Anderson pointed out at a building that had relative height over a larger complex. Nature had intermingled with urban development: perhaps speaking toward a wanted synchronization between humanity and nature. Space travel tended to paint introspective looks upon, at least, greenery in more than just the aesthetic sense.

Below, as they made their swooping landing approach, they passed over men in military formation in their PTs, the yard in that complex open. Grunts and officers there, going through drills perhaps, or maybe, just maybe, initiation? The echo of a group of new recruits had echoed up into the air, the ghost of a memory coming up to JD's forefront as he simply sat and awaited to land. His oath had been something he remembered by heart:

"_I, being of legal age, of my own free will without coercion, promises, or inducement of any kind, after having been duly advised and warned of the consequences of this oath, swear to uphold the institutions of the Unified Earth Government against all enemies, foreign and domestic; to protect and defend Earth and her colonies; to obey lawful orders of the High Command of the United Nations Space Command, I hereby accept responsibility for the defense of humanity. __**So help me God**__."_

He didn't remember if he prayed recently, but God probably had a hand in his situation he shrewdly thought. That is, if God remained the same. A difficult, existential thought surely.

He was never a good Catholic anyway.

Most Marines tend not to be.

Religion went out the window when fighting an alien empire who believed themselves the servants of gods, especially if they had the firepower to prove it. Though, he had to wonder about Mai. He had seen her bare, in that locker room, saw her skin in places that wouldn't be polite in their acquaintance such far. He remembered the scars, the bruises, the wounds, but he also remembered the string necklace and the wooden wheel that had sunk and be almost hidden in her cleavage.

He had, vaguely, recognized it somewhere in his knowledge. What exactly, he couldn't tell, but it was something he could place a name on.

In his stomach he felt the pull of Gs, the shuttle moving down until, all at once, it stopped in mid air a foot off the ground.

"This is your stop, Chiefs." Anderson spoke to both of them. JD had risen but not before Mai had cocked her head to the side.

"You're not coming with us sir?"

Anderson had shook his head negative. "I'm going to be pre-occupied with arrangements on the Normandy, is that going to be a problem?"

Mai shook her head. "No sir."

He knew what she was getting at however. She needed directives. "You have everything at your disposal to make yourselves comfortable. The rest is within you."

JD had stepped off, only to see a neatly dressed young man walk toward them. One scan around and it was apparent where they were in a landing zone for Kodiaks attached to the buildings around them, lousy with military signage they could hardly decipher.

That's when Mai had heard it: above the sound of the Kodiak's jets. It was the sound of a civilian populace just beyond those walls: of a street being used benignly at a city going through its day. That was where Anderson was leaving them.

"You have comms with the Normandy. Bounce it up there if you need me, Chiefs."

"But why sir? We're…-" Impossible to describe, surely. Mai had, for once, been afraid of being alone for a reason that tore at her self, her lungs, and her mind.

"It's not my place to guide you like children. You're adults, a free man and woman. If I do this anyway else you'll become dependent."

Thrown into the deep end, and it was the orders.

They saw his point as they both rendered salute, and only when he had returned it had the doors closed on that Kodiak and it had disappeared back into the sky, leaving them alone.

That neatly dressed young man had arrived within talking distance. Not military, and any military personnel in their area, and there had been quite a few, had paid no mind to them. They hadn't looked out of the ordinary. It wasn't a military uniform that young man wore, but rather that of a hotel concierge. "I've been instructed to lead you to your accommodations. Welcome back to Earth sir, ma'am."

They'd never been, and consequently, never left. All JD could do was nod and offer a hand gesture for the boy to lead the way. "Plain clothed huh? You guys must really be some deep operators." He made a remark on their clothing and, vaguely, JD knew what he was talking about. Once long ago, on the battlefields of Earth where the first insurgencies were, centuries ago, the idea of the most elite combat operators were that who wore casual clothing like them.

They walked on concrete and steel, with sneakers, dulled footsteps taking them under the shadow of that looming building attached to that compound. A distinctive type face near its top: Marriot.

The concierge had his own omni-tool, flashing as the glass doors they approached verified it was him. "Normally we don't enter guests this way, but then again most guests don't come in through via the landing pad. Usually we're just a dust off point for deployments, either that or a place for Marines to stay while they get their stations figured out."

It explained those Marines they'd seen coming in as they came in through the backway of the hotel. When they broke through to the hotel in its actuality, they were presented with a sight they hadn't seen in years or been unfamiliar with entirely: a lobby that hadn't been used for a triage or caught up in a war. Just a domestic view of life through almost painfully bright lights and modern décor. Air conditioning that was almost too comfortable had entered their lungs as they were lead through a door into that lobby.

"Six-thirteen Anne." He had spoken across the room to one of the employees behind the desk. She had flashed a thumbs up at the young man. In that lobby had been the guests themselves, or rather, guests to be:

There was a theme, and it had been families with, typically, a young male just barely younger than JD and Mai in dress blues.

"Ship-date for some of these guys are coming up, so they're gonna be shipped down to Parris Island in a few days from here. Families like to be around for that." The young man explained as he led the two into an elevator.

Nearly a second they had both stepped in they had been coaxed out. Six floors wasn't much for an elevator in the 22nd century. Still looked like a hotel however as the hallways still were of that homely, very much hotel looking corridors with doors going down as far as they could see.

"Any extended stays?" JD asked him.

He pondered for a bit in his face as he slowed his walking, coming to a door: 613. "A few. I think one private security recruiter stays around here for when guys get back from deployment. Picks 'em up, and all that. My dad's a lifer in the Navy, so he won't even look at him when he comes visits."

Mai's face shriveled at the thought of that. Maybe it was her aversion to such human mercenary groups in general, most of them falling underneath the Insurgency or hampering UNSC efforts, but to serve for something other than service itself was still a foreign subject to her. She was trained one way, and that pure devotion grinded at her.

The young man's omni-tool flashed again, the door's internal lock opening with a subsequent pull of the handle. Of all the places they had been pulled through, as if drunk and in a haze, this was the place that sobered them now.

"But yeah, this hotel is used for families to stay at before we either ship out the new recruits or for would be Marines with cold feet." The attendant had answered simply, with a little snark. "Usually they don't tip well."

JD had gotten the hint. "Oh- uh. How do you-?" He had tried to gesture his left arm, trying to turn on the omni-tool.

The attendant rolled his eyes. "It's alright, I'm just joshing you bud. Hope you enjoy your stay."

Without knowing if there was any ill-will, he had left, leaving the two alone with two beds that had been looking all too enticing. JD had known these types of hotels well: places for families to stay in before they lost their children to the war. His mother had stayed in a similar place on the other side of the moon, too emotionally exhausted to even take a shuttle back over to home. Civilian bedding, slices of domestic life afforded by the hospitality business. It served a purpose, undoubtedly: to ease them back into a civilian life at some point. JD remembered it well. The macabre sense of humor that pervaded the corps replaced with wholesome life of neighborhoods and people filling up those lunar urban life. Bodegas, fresh coffee, clothes that had been designed to be fashionable instead of in a firefight, food not meant to increase caloric count but rather to be enjoyed. Cigarettes and sleeping in, nine to five jobs and children and teens to be dealt with on the day to day acting as if nothing had been wrong in the galaxy. Crudely, but still very much true, no fear of physical relationships getting stomped out by regulation and uptight officers.

This hotel room meant, in a way, life could be enjoyed: not fought for.

If only he could give that meaning to Mai as she had immediately opened up the balcony blinds and looked out, scanning, only to sit herself in a corner of the room opposite of the door and wrap her arms around herself, uneasy.

Fighting Covenant in bogs was familiar. Shooting Insurrectionists in sewers was familiar. Flying combat aircraft and killing dozens pass by pass was familiar. Sitting in a hotel room, with no mission, no weapons, and no idea of what they were in, that was not familiar to the Spartan.

She wasn't scared, she just didn't know what to do, and it, in a small sense, paralyzed her. Nothing could've trained her for this. She was not raised, after all: all she had was training.

It was a word he didn't want to entertain. Either because he didn't want to even consider if he could've had it, or anyone he knew could've had it, but in all likelihood perhaps her tendencies, her lack of knowing might've compounded with something that killed more men than even the Covenant. There were words for it throughout history: Battle Fatigue, Post-Vietnam syndrome, Shell Shock, PTSD. Now they were faced with the post part of it.

"Mai. You can sleep first. I'll stay awake."

_I'll take watch. Get some shut eye._

That's how soldiers slept in the field, and for Mai, and even JD to an extent, they were deep in the unknown. This was their normal.

* * *

They returned their equipment, they returned their dead.

This was the first time they had ever seen this from humans.

In steel caskets, their bodies cleaned of battle. From Elite down to Grunt, they were all given the respect the UNSC would never. The Covenant, bar a few Grand Admirals, had never been the ones to give the humans respect in the war. Only death, and nothing ceremonious about it. So the humans never showed any respect back, lowly tactics and decisions taking Covenant lives away, and certainly never giving their dead back.

It was hardwired into all of their minds that every single human was a heretic, a virus upon the Great Journey that had to be cleansed. Either by the light of the Sacred Rings, or by the Covenant themselves. Times had changed, evidently. Time and place that is. There were mostly humans, but other aliens had helped as well. Willingly, begrudgingly, it wasn't uniform, but they abided in the name of peace.

The more things change, the more they stay the same however. "Some bodies lost in ocean. Might be unrecoverable. Sorry for this."

Professor Mordin Solus had been more than willing to talk directly to the Covenant, his regard for xenoscience studies ranged from urban to agrarian, studying species such as the Turians, Asari, and Batarian. Some would say he was the very model of a scientist Salarian, though those who truly knew what he had been might've agreed that he was more than qualified to deal, up close, the unknown aliens of the Covenant.

Usze had been right alongside, immediately having gone to work with his men to oversee the transfer of the dead back into their hands on the docks of the Altis colony, ferrying them back to the Solace via Phantom. He wasn't ignorant. If the events as told to him by the Shipmistress were true, these aliens would've kept some bodies for themselves to study.

"Unavoidable, Professor." He said, arms crossed across his crimson armor plates, a Carbine in his hand. The faces of the dead had passed by them all solemnly.

"Great deal of revelation revealed to you. Has it not?"

Usze considered the "Salarian" as he spoke. He was right. A great deal of revelations had come to pass, as was the reason, for the first time in his own life, he had been within slashing distance of humans and not swinging. For now, they were no longer fighting, and it screamed against him as humans helped cart over the dead. He was born to fight, and his true purpose felt… squandered.

He held his Needle Rifle close to his chest, but not at risk of being aggressive. Not with Professor Solus by him.

The good Professor reminded him of an Ascetic he knew, how, privately, that particular patron of the Ascetic beliefs had sought back to a time when Sangheili designs ruled Sangheili crews. It was something lost to the Covenant: that is, the Sangheili being reduced to the warrior caste of the Covenant. Where had their scientists, engineers and philosophers had gone? History of course.

Which was to say gone.

"Taken in interest in me, have you Professor?" Usze asked plainly. He had been given command of the usual affair: several lesser Minor Elites and the usual assortment of Grunts and Jackals, but they paid no mind to their conversation as they carted caskets.

Professor Solus only smiled innocently. "Would you not be if in my position?"

"It wouldn't be in my interests. I'm a warrior, not a scientific analyst." He answered.

"Something forbidding you to do both?"

Usze blew air out of his nose. "Hmph." He knew what the good Professor wanted: just a plain reaction to this in his own words. It would never be in good judgement to proclaim how a First Contact would go with a species, but Usze understood: it wouldn't look like this, and this was not normal at all. Not only did he feel it just by the fact he could see humans within arms reach and not slash them apart, but also just rationally.

What "Admiral Hackett" had told him had weighed much upon his mind, and, given that he had ejected everyone in that room but him to tell, it was a secret that was told for the sake of convincing him to help cooperate.

This was not their world, and anything that happened now because of it merely in light of that revelation.

Usze gave no more bait to the Professor as he simply stood and kept looking over each coffin. Even that however the Professor had taken details from as he began something he was known for with his mouth, finger at his cream colored chin:

"Surprisedtobecollectingdead, heightenedtensionaroundspeciesunalignedwithCovenantingeneral, butespeciallyaroundhuman. Initialconfrontationreportsasgleamedfamiliaritywithhumans,butnotfriendly. Almost all soldiers? Noscientists,civilians,orotherwisediplomaticmeansseeninothermilitaryshipsinknowngalaxy. Assumenoneed. Why no need? Nodiplomaticconnectionairsalternative: conflict? Conflict. Prolongedwar? War? With Humanity? Peace no longer an option? ButSystemsAlliance, ornoknown humanelements, knowntobeengagedinprolongedconflict." Tangents gone as fast as slipspace travel. Usze had wondered if one of the lower prophets concerned with the sciences would enjoy listening to this. Usze didn't, not as Professor Solus began to, just by inference alone, air very close to something impossible. "Atwarwith humanity, but, notthishumanity. Andnotraceofelementzerodetectedonanyof you, equipmentorevenships, which, evenbybasicgalacticcontaminationcomeanyspacetravelinknowngalaxy, impossible. Where. Did. You. Come. From?"

Solus's hands made a chopping motion in his other, directed at Usze, the man frozen as if waiting his turn. Usze had been caught up in a literal wave earlier and it had nearly drowned him. He felt the same pressure now as he felt like he needed to take a breath for the both of them. The answer he could give was hardly satiating to Solus, but understood. "If you were in my place, would you understand I cannot answer these questions of yours?"

The Professor's form seemed dejected all at once, but he sprung back up like a child's balloon, a smile still on his face as he nodded understandingly.

"Your name at least. Is there societal/cultural pattern to it? Why are you named as such? Usze Tahamee?"

Usze made small nodding motions with his head, relaxing, just a bit. This he could entertain. "Usze is my given name, Professor, and Taham is that of my family's, my clan's historical holding."

Solus seemingly wrote an entire page of it in his data pad. "And what of the -ee?"

Usze looked toward the Solace, abuzz like a hive. "It is to designate that I am a warrior of the Covenant, nothing more, nothing less."

"And what are you without Covenant?"

In another universe, in another time and place, under the leadership of an Arbiter that would come from the victory at Reach and the desecration of a Holy Ring by a Demon, Usze Tahamee, but then Taham, would know that answer.

This was not his place however.

"Personal question. Sorry. Not now." Solus understood as Usze processed that question and the absurdity of it. "Usze Tahamee. Wish to keep correspondence or work with you down the line. Are you opposed?"

Usze furrowed his brows, his mandibles airing out as they do when in thought. It was very easy to say no. "If my superiors clear it, Professor Solus."

Most likely not, he figured.

"Ah. I see." When Professor Solus reached out his hand some of his troops on security had freaked, the move fast, but Usze knew what it was. A handshake. This time he was obliged to return it after calming his men around. It was in best emulation of a handshake he could give, based on the statues of humans he had seen while they had been on the attack in the colonies, commemorating some event or another. What had taken him off guard was what the professor said before letting go of his hand. "Humans trustworthy here. Not all good, not all bad, as usual, but can be trusted. Moral species. If Covenant is religious hegemony then know that humans spirituality highly ingrained in their hearts. Would know, have explored recently. See you down the line." There was a hint of sadness behind that that even Usze could catch over his translator.

The Salarian had left before he had elaborated, off to observe some other mystery that he could attend to. The Professor, evidently was a busy man because he wanted to be, and feared not what would happen because of it.

"This is Shipmistress Karonee to the Shadows. Lieutenant Major Tahamee?" Her voice had been soothing, to say the least. It hadn't been the frantic, or bombastic, air of command in her words. Things had calmed down, and she had adjusted after brilliantly barging down a side of a building with a Scarab.

He turned away from the collection line progressing, holding his earpiece in his helmet. "Go ahead, Shipmistress."

"Are the casualty collections going smoothly?"

* * *

"Are the casualty collections going smoothly?"

It wasn't the Solace, but it was familiar. She was going to end up on this ship anyway in order for her to be shipped back to her actual flagship. The Blood of Union was, evidently, loss to her forever now.

The Ardent Prayer had been recovered by the Brute, Mercaius, and he had stood next to her now as the ship bobbed lightly in the current of the waves in the shadow of the Solace. It was dragged back by Phantoms as well, and, after a through sweeping of blood and bodies: remnants of the battle that had seized the vessel, they had preformed a checklist of what was required to get the Ardent Prayer flying again.

Evidently not much.

It suffered structural damage that the Huragok had been more than happy to bend back into place via the Solace's remaining engineer facilities, brought back out on the water.

"No complications Shipmistress. We should be done within the hour… Could be done without me even."

Usze spoke back to her. She looked to Mercaius as he ran through the bridge consoles for anything of note, pulling up security cam footage of what, exactly, had happened to them all. In the end it didn't surprise any of them: Demons had come aboard this ship in an act of subversion and trickery, arming one of their Slipspace drives to disrupt the Solace by removing it from the equation over Reach. It was always the Demons, and seeing one had gotten the blood pumping between the Brute and the Shipmistress. The Slipspace Drive was still present in the hanger. Battered, but, as far as the Huragok could tell, still functional. Battle reports from the front during the initial planetfall had revealed that the Demon and at least one of her Imps had survived as well, a fact that Usze would be sure to corroborate.

"Good. I want you to stay in position and await pick up by me personally. We're going into orbit and the Shadows will come with me."

"Of course, Shipmistress." The line went dead after.

The Shadows were the unit of Covenant Spec Ops deployed to the Solace, and he had been their most junior officer. Now, evidently, their only officer. It turns out he had been the only one on the ship at the time of the Slipspace rupture, the rest already deployed on planet, or yet to be found among the bodies that had either been lost in orbit or still floating among the waves.

Command restructuring had been going well ever since contact had been made with the Alliance and the so called "Council". Without the ever-present threat of being bombarded from orbit, it gave the Covenant time to get settled and to reorganize. For the time being in regards to Spec Ops, Usze was all she had in that department.

"Tell me my Decanus," Karonee spoke to the Brute. "How're your people?"

Mercaius crossed his arms, his white face paint crinkling with his face. "We would be better if not for all this water, Shipmistress. We are not natural swimmers."

"Hah." Karonee forced a laugh as she ran her hands again over the command console of the Ardent Prayer. It was cleaned of Sangheili blood from the Demon thankfully. "Spaceflight doesn't befit your people either, does it?"

A jab. Elite vs Brute, as old as the Covenant itself seemingly.

Mercaius shook it off promptly, answering properly. "We didn't lose many in the planetfall. Only those on duty in the loss sections or in the lower decks. The loss of our Chieftans however weighs heavily, and we would be quick to exert that anger onto the humans."

Karonee nodded as she toyed with the console, beginning power transfers from axillaries to main systems gradually. Some more bridge crew had been recruited out of necessity, Elites, Brutes, and even Engineers among those quickly given a crash course in how to command a ship and given their duties. They performed admirably, astutely, as those that shared the bridge with her now began to confirm her orders and brought the ship back to working order, it bobbing in the waves.

"How have they taken the news? Of our… situation?'

Mercaius tightened the grip on his Gravity Hammer. "It is hard to believe, Shipmistress."

"As it should be, but is there anything happening that would make the processions… more difficult?"

Mercaius grunted. "As always the Brutes will follow the lead of the Hierarchs, and if the Prophet of Destiny shall see it fit that we will speak to the humans, we will do so."

Not only had the Covenant needed to contest with the fact that they had simply been out of their universe, but also that any hostilities against the humans would now be ceased until further notice out of the pure inconceivable fact that the humans now were not the same as they had waged war against.

What was the difference? As asked one Brute. They all look the same anyway.

The difference, as said Destiny, lie in their intent.

Had the humans in their world simply accepted that they were to be exterminated, Truth had once mused during his sermons on High Charity, perhaps the Covenant would've taken the effort to integrate them in.

Regardless, even if they wanted to fight, there was no recourse for them to do so realistically. Ground combat analysis had only meant so much when support from space was a factor, but even then the reports of human combat tactics from the "System Alliance" had been… crude to the human's disadvantage. A lack of combat experience it all spoke to.

The UNSC knew how to fight Covenant on the ground to a standstill, and so that was the difference that many, even before their reality changing revelation, had found out if they were engaged with those humans after the crash.

"Shipmistress. Energy readings are green. The Engineers report that repairs to the ventral stabilizing wings have been completed and the ship is being drained." An Elite bridge crew had said. "What are we to do with the human equipment?"

Human space craft, arms, and, of course, bodies had been within the Ardent Prayer, and during clean up they had been hauled over to a cargo space. Initially it was thought that, just for formality, they would transfer the bodies back to the humans, but that thought was quickly shot down upon remembering that these humans were not of the same sort. The fight craft that had been on the Ardent Prayer's upper deck had been mostly picked apart by the Jackals belong to the Ardent Prayer's crew, as was most of the human gear in general, however there was one item that had been kept where it had been:

The human slipspace drive.

Immediately upon its discovery in the hanger Karonee had ordered a team to check what the humans had done to it in order to have brought them so far from home, but the answer came fast and no solution to their predicament had come: it had just been a slipspace drive that had operated without a destination solution with its safety parameters turned off. It more triggered an act of nature than it had been responsible for their current location. No one had planned this, and it would've been impossible to plan for.

"Keep it quarantined, however, if there is any damage… repair it."

"You are very easy to accuse of being heretical, Shipmistress." Mercaius had voiced the shock of some Elites who had heard that order.

The Elite form of a shrug had come over Karonee's form. "In these circumstances I believe any in my position would be. Would not we all be heretical for not laying waste to the humans right now? Even in the face of our death?"

"Should I proceed to make movements to?" Humor from a Brute was hard to catch, but Karonee caught it.

"If it would help your nerves, Decanus."

It was hard to notice, but she wasn't a Shipmistress without earning it. Even on her ship there had been Brutes, and so she read them. Mercaius had been anxious, unsure, everything about how tightly he held his hammer was evidence to it.

She couldn't blame him. He had been now de facto chieftain of nearly a million brutes and that either meant he had that responsibility or was liable to be challenged to someone who did want it.

"I am able, Shipmistress." He said, wanting no doubt in her mind.

There was none. "I know, my Decanus. Then you would again assume temporary command of this ship when I am off of it?"

She was soft spoken when no one was looking, person to person. Perhaps that was how she communicated her trust: giving those believed unworthy into command.

Her grace was rewarded with Mercaius performing admirably when she had led the assault on the Colony to recover her men.

"I concur with Shipmistress Karonee." His voice broke through like reverb as the entire bridge crew went to their knees. Destiny on his grav chair had been escorted in, his slender Prelate guard besides him along with an amalgamation of Brute and Elite Honor Guards.

Never before had Brutes held the title of Honor Guard in the Covenant, but now were extra ordinary times as Destiny skipped groping Karonee this time and instead just motioned all of them to rise. She was grateful. "Even without these circumstances, I know Truth and Regret often spoke of giving Brutes more resposnbility, even on the High Council."

That suggestion had betrayed Karonee's ears. She wanted to speak out against such things. No Brute would be able to seriously handle such motions in the Covenant, but alas her mouth was shut as Destiny came to Mercaius, waving a finger over him like a blessing.

She looked, briefly, to the tower prelate. This was how large, or rather, how tall a San'Shyuum could've been. More than three times her height, and no face to put to it but a dark visor of a helmet.

Destiny had been onboard the Ardent Prayer for this: through careful communications diplomatic contact was to be established in person onboard the dreadnaught "SSV Kilimanjaro". By what measure: five shuttles. The Alliance however had never told them how those shuttles were to be transported.

The Covenant would not be mere welp, not with a fully functioning corvette (the size of one of their frigates apparently) about to be brought up to speed.

Even then, back in the colony, their forces had been chest to chest with the Alliance and the "Council" which had explained the other aliens aligned with the humans. Tensions had cooled as Covenant forces got used to being so close to human, or any non-Covenant. It wasn't as if the Alliances or the Council would do anything.

Still, just in case, the Brutes were at times held back from those patrols or positions that put them in contact with the opposition.

"Are preparations ready, Shipmistress?"

She shook her head up and down once, going to her console and pressing a single button.

* * *

On the bridge of the Perugia Shaw had made a note to himself to personally wipe down the seat of his chair at some point. This was as he was getting changed into his dress blues in his quarters. Both his previous outfit and the chair was lousy with sweat and he'd be hard pressed to make a crew member clean it out of pure embarrassment.

"You look good sir." His XO said plainly as she handed off a datapad of guidelines on how this diplomatic contact was going to go. It was from both the Council and the Alliance First Contact Committee.

Both of them totally at odds with each other.

"I look like a balding, fat, angry man."

"So you look like a good captain." She responded back again.

He might've kept throwing the conversation back and forth, for it was the most normal thing to happen in the last few days, however he was reminded he was in the thick of it as a member of his crew screamed out in alert.

"Object Delta reemerged from Covenant operation zone! It's under power and air-worthy!"

The two officers remerged from his quarters just in time to see a ship that had just recently sustained a planetfall rise up again.

"No use of eezo?" Shaw had sat back into that sweaty chair, regretting it with a wince. "Is there any Element Zero at all being emanated?'

"Negative! Scans show zero."

On the view screen the Ardent Prayer had, dripping wet from its bottom, resumed flight as it slowly made its way toward the colony.

* * *

The Elite Hunter, a Fuel Rod Gun over his shoulders. He was taller than Usze, older, greyer than he. He spoke with an older baritone that didn't' echo, but drawled. A tired voice. One that Usze heard as the Elite approached him. He had stuck nearby the First Lieutenant out of lack of other orders. "Would it matter to you, if I told you my opinion, Lieutenant?"

His armor was silver: his helmet, that of a glass dome revealing his face behind it. Usze knew it as the battle armor of the Rangers. EVA-capable and jump jet trained soldiers meant to rain death from above.

"I would like to hear it."

"I was there, on the human world of Harvest, when the humans took it back. I was assigned to an Arbiter's force."

The campaign which resulted in the humans taking Harvest back had been two decades ago, and the last Arbiter had been on planet with a force in regards to Forerunner artifact retrieval. He knew this because Ripa Moramee was a cautionary tale for all Spec Ops Elites in terms of bloodlust. Capability and ability is easy to abuse with lust of battle, and that Arbiter had cost him many men and his own life.

"You were there?"

The Elite nodded. "I was a young Minor then, my unit wiped out during the final days of our occupation there." He seemed distant, thinking back to a Covenant failure. "When the humans have the advantage, they do not squander it. We would all be dead if this were the Galaxy we know."

"There are many ways one can be taken advantage of."

As was why many of these bodies would be checked for trackers or other surprises.

The older Elite had touched Usze's shoulder. "There are forces here I think, that even the humans are accounting for."

They saw, in the distance from the shadow of the solace an SDV-class ship raise up, and then move toward them steadily as onlookers on that harbor and all over the city, both Covenant, Alliance, and Council looked in awe. This was the pickup which Usze was expecting.

"Are you tasked with a group at this moment?" He asked.

The Elite shook his head, remorsefully. "Again, I find myself without my unit." The war had done much to him, and most Elites who had risen to such a rank had held some sort of melancholy. Either that or they were themselves lusting after faith and fatalities.

The Elite was experienced, obviously entrusted with great weight and skill given his armor and armament, and now was not the time to stand on ceremony. "What is your name?" Usze asked softly.

The Elite sniffed the air, clearing his nose. "Ke Nazhumee. Major. Ranger Battalion of the A Long Night of Solace."

Usze nodded once. Of all the actual decisions he had to make as a newly minted Spec Ops officer, this one was within his ability. "Ke Nazhumee, you are hereby conscripted into the Shadows underneath my jurisdiction given the circumstances. Have you any objections?"

Ke had tilted his head up, flaring his nostrils once, eyes squinting at the younger Elite. "No." he said, albeit cautiously.

Usze had offered one finger to Ke to follow, and he did as the troop transporter on the Ardent Prayer went alight as it approached them, sending a beam of light down to step into. Onlookers unfamiliar with such a beam ran for cover, but there was nothing to fear. They knew the feeling well, and all the Professor Mordin Solus could do was watch from the distance as, like the old Earth stories of alien abductions, the two Elites had ridden up into the air, levitated, and disappeared into that ship before it rose off into the atmosphere.

* * *

"Rise, young officer." It wasn't his first time he had been in the presence of a prophet. Being groomed for the Honor Guard, those on High Charity often picked favorites among the stock and would-be Honor Guards such as Usze. So he took his first meeting with the Prophet of Destiny in stride as he had reemerged into the Ardent Prayer in a hanger full with what he recognized as a regular boarding complement, anti-matter charges and all. "You have done the Covenant well, despite the… abnormality of it all."

Destiny touched his finger along the scar on Usze's face, ragged, slanted, left by a Demon. "I do so for the Great Journey."

"That is good. It is a shame you are not safely on High Charity now. To have you lost in… our circumstances is a loss for all the Covenant."

So the general reports were true, and the crew of the Solace also had believed: transported away from their known reality and plopped down there.

"The humans know." Usze reported from his chat with the Admiral Hackett.

Karonee had been there besides Destiny, the two sharing a concerned look. How would they?

Perhaps it would be made clear in the coming conference, but for now, Usze had his orders.

"First Lieutenant," Karonee started, Usze returning to ramrod straight. Nazhumee had already been given his new orders underneath him, organizing newly assigned troops into order into Phantoms and Spirits. "You are to provide the Prophet of Destiny and myself escort as we make diplomatic contact with the Systems Alliance and the Council. Standard boarding procedures that are otherwise… changed given the non-hostile skew of this."

Destiny had been given his best robes, and Karonee had also been appropriately garbed, her sword proudly displayed a little more forward on her hips than usual for the sake of it being worn to see.

The real attention grabber however had been the black clad Prelate standing over Destiny.

He had heard rumors of their ability that would put even a Zealot to shame, but wouldn't inquire.

He had orders to follow through with. "I understand."

"When we're in the ship, full escort duty and tactical command is given to you. I cannot sacrifice any of my thoughts to it. Do you understand?"

"Of course, Shipmistress."

She tightened her jaws. "I'm sorry for throwing so much at you, Young Shadow."

Usze had no reaction. "I go where I am deemed necessary. I shall preform as best I can."

Destiny could only smile at Karonee. Usze had been a real choice Elite.

The smell of a firefight days ago had still lingered, and the fact that the Ardent Prayer itself was still in use spoke to a desperation that the Covenant hadn't before been in.

"_Is it wise for us to be entertaining the humans, or anyone else, at all?" Karonee asked Destiny privately._

"_We cannot fulfill our duty to the Gods if we are dead. And besides, should they come to see us as trustable, as inquireable and communicateable, they shall hear our messages too of our Great Journey."_

And that was that as Usze simply reloaded and adjusted himself, finding the Phantom he was to lead in. When he was sucked up by its beam his complement was already in the position, all the transports ready and waiting in that hanger: the ground zero for many an event those last few hours.

Bullets holes and plasma scoring had still been lousy for when the Demons had been there, and it burned his scar to think of the one that got away.

Nazhumee had placed a hand on his shoulder as he found his feet in that darkened bay of the Phantom, men lined up appropriately. Spec Ops like him, and Honor Guards. They both exchanged a knowing nod, one was appreciative, the other was affirming.

Usze hadn't minded being caught up in order after order, duty after duty. It was how he best operated: on autopilot, his feet taking him between the rows of his men as each stood straight in his presence, awaiting his judgement, his orders.

He gave them.

"When we joined the Covenant, we took an oath!" Usze walked through the line of troops with him. He recognized none: the remains of the Spec Ops complement of the Solace. More would be dredged up, conscripted, trained and pressed into service, but for now this is who he had.

"According to our station! All without exception!" The Spec Ops troops roared back.

Usze curled his hands, speaking the words of Rtas, of any Spec Ops officer worth his steel in the missions that took the Covenant above and beyond. He knew these words well, and knew it in his heart. Now however was the first time he had led the chants.

"On the blood of our fathers. On the blood of our sons. We swore to uphold the Covenant!"

"_**Even to our dying breath!"**_

Per mission, there was always differences, tailored for what they were about to do. And what they were to do now? It was inconceivable, impossible to prepare for. They were still in the thick of it however, and they weren't dead yet.

"Even across the galaxy, across the stars, nothing has changed. The holiness of the Writ of Union is unwavering, wherever the Covenant goes! All that matters are that _**the Gods are in their heaven, and so all is right in the world!**_ Let us continue our march to _**glorious salvation**_!"

* * *

Ardent Prayer rose past the clouds, into the heavens, into the stars as every ship in orbit trained its sensors on it. Perugia especially:

"Contact. Scans confirm it to be Object Delta. It's space worthy."

"So, it begins." He said. "Get me my shuttle to the Kilimanjaro."

"Yes sir."

* * *

The human ships were smaller than previously encountered, but then again, this was a new brand of human. At least the dreadnaught of the humans was able to accommodate every shuttle at once as its hanger bays opened, platoons of Marines and soldiers from every Council race and humanity there either formally at attention, or with their rifles out and on security.

Shaw had observed as he had made his way there before the Covenant ship got into range, meeting with his Council appointed delegation.

Admiral Sirixo had been the Salarian designee, General Tailus for the Turians. Both had been about equal with him in terms of experience, and that, private, Shaw was glad for. The Salarian had dark skin for his kind, but that was all Shaw could differentiate with in the hanger as he shook Talius's hand.

"Forgive me shouting earlier at you, General." Shaw spoke to him in regards to telling the Turian to have his ships stand down.

Tailus looked unhurt, some of his fringes seemingly burnt off, his skin pale. "You did what you had to do, Captain."

Shaw could only nod as he looked around. "Is there an Asari representative?"

Sirixo had adjusted the cuff on his sleeve as he nodded his head. "Just arrived from out of system, she was the closest Matriarch."

A Matriarch? Shaw had then now been upstanded. Then again all of them were if a Matriarch had been there.

"A Spectre escorted her too actually." Sirixo seemed hardly concerned with saying that. Shaw however saw it differently. "First time he's shown up in a while actually."

"Oh trust me," Tailus began, standing straight, but turning over to the door that lead into the hanger as he heard metal footsteps. "He's the person to be busy."

Static filled the air as that door opened: a darkly clothed, almost sinisterly dressed woman had seemed to float in given how her dress covered her legs. Shaw wasn't sure what she had on display was what the Asari needed to give during their first contact, but he had kept his eyes politely squared on her face as Sirixo greeted her first. "Ah, Matriarch Benezia. It is an honor to make the acquaintance."

"The pleasure is my own." She bowed to both Sirixio and Tailus, and then, finally, offering a hand to Shaw to touch upon. He did, and he couldn't help but feel the static in the air compounded by dampness, choking at him as he pressed on her fingers and let go. Her form was hiding the source of what pricked at his skin like a thousand bugs:

It was almost like his teeth were showing, skull bared. One eye replaced, but the other all blue. His skin was wilting like that of a hornet's nest, but, for some reason, the Turian General greeted him warmly. "**Saren Arterius**, in the flesh. Thought you were busy with more important assignments."

Benezia returned to Saren's side briefly, almost to affirm that he was with her. Asides from his head and collar, nothing below had revealed his flesh. A cloak, heavy armor, his face was stone cold as he looked at Tailus and spoke in a voice Shaw could only compared to a razor against violin string. Shaw knew who he was. The most famous Spectre in all of the Council.

"I deemed this situation to be of merit to attend, especially in such dangerous circumstances." He spoke like Ryder, Shaw noticed until his mind went blank. Saren stared directly at him. "Why are the humans, at all, involved in such a delicate meeting?"

Shaw's mouth went dry. "It's- It's our space, Spectre."

"Is it now?" Saren removed himself from Tailus, leaning in toward Shaw ever so slowly. Shaw didn't smell anything from Saren. Nothing at all. "Can you truly call this planet your own if you humans cannot even hold onto it in peace?"

Sirixio said nothing, and Tailus was liable to agree. Still Benezia had put a hand on Arterius's shoulder, pulling him back. "Now now, remember that the humans are a young species. They have much to learn."

The Spectre turned up his head. How odd, Shaw looked at his form, or rather, lack thereof hidden behind his cloak and armor. He didn't look... regular? He did look tall, for he was tall, towering over him as he turned away, disregarding Shaw entirely along with every other human in the room. "Or maybe they need to learn their place." He turned to Tailus before he left back where he came. "I'll be commandeering our forces here, just in case."

"Of course."

Without delay five unknown shapes had appeared right at the Kilimanjaro's hanger, pulling Shaw out of it, and into position. Benezia however had said one last thing to him, into his ear. "Pay no mind to him, Captain, we need you here and now."

Five shuttles, two different types. One looked as if it had been designed after a Hanar's head, the other a tuning fork. Purple in their coloration they hummed with an uneasy vibrato. They each had a turret on their forms: locked for peace's sake, but still visible as the shuttles, after settling into the hanger, opened up in their own ways.

The Hanar-headed shuttles on their sides had opened up, revealing a bay and more turrets mounted by the smaller aliens. Doors and hatches were opened, purple lights at the bottom of the shuttles opening into a ring-like apparition only to spit out troops.

Thirty troops each, five shuttles in total. One hundred and fifty and then some then. That's what had flooded out of each shuttle as uniformly as they could. There was no rush, no heat of combat, but there was a rigid tenseness that was felt the second the first Elites had hit the steel ground of the hanger with stars to their back. Under any other pretense, they would be raiding this ship and burning through it with practice only gained through combat.

They came with that equipment: with weapons and organizations meant for everything to go South. That was not their intent however, even as the first of Usze's Elites hit the ground and he drew his sword, igniting it. Each time an energy sword was ignited it meant nothing less than blood; the promise that, if combat was to happen, the sword would taste flesh.

He hadn't even turned when he felt the slamming of two Hunters hitting the deck, their fuel rod guns charged and primed as they alone drew the gaze of many a trooper there.

For the Covenant, there had been no one of the opposition that had been too out of their knowledge: all of them, Turians, Salarians, Asari, bipedal and human like. It was a simple proposition that did not hinder, at all, how they deployed.

It was a different case for the Council however.

The Grunts came by the dozens, their squat bodies filling in the spaces of squads as each carried with them a weapon to support those that came with them. To the Jackals, this was just another day of fun: boarding a ship with all the bravado as one could expect from a race that had made its own name as pirates. On each Phantom, two Jackals had remained on the boarding ramps along with the Grunt gunners, beam rifles held by them as all the other Jackals activated their energy shields and dropped down in front of the Elites.

This wasn't, in practice, a widely performed maneuver. The Turians especially had seen the way the Jackals had formed a shield wall in front of the Elites as they hit the ground of the hanger: like the ancient warriors of Palaven's oldest history, the formation they took in was that of a warrior culture especially.

It was a miracle of discipline that it had all come together like this. It was another miracle still that the Brutes, when they emerged, did nothing but play their part by forming the backline.

From the balcony of the hanger Marines and Turian alike had adjusted their aim, unable to know their target priorities just by how varied the incoming security force had been.

There had been talks, amongst the council that, perhaps, maybe one day, that there could've been one unified military that acted on behest of the Council. To the humans this would've been most analogous to the UN Security Forces of the 21st century. But what that meant was that Asari and Turians, Salarians and Humans, and then whoever else would come to sit on the Council would send their best to be commanded by the joint leadership of the wider galactic community. It might've looked something like the array they saw now, but alas they wouldn't be ready for it.

Not now, and, in another universe, in another historical path, only when an extragalactic killing force far beyond their comprehension would come.

How impressive it looked, General Tailus thought as his personal guard all furrowed their brows, the safeties on their pistols turned off. How did it all work? He thought. How many different command hierarchies and pure cultural, societal differences had to be accounted for in such a union where nearly a dozen species were involved? Chaos incarnate, he might've thought.

Though "Covenant" implied something far greater than blood or individual societal or species bound quirks. It spoke to a greater power. A shared religious destiny. That by itself might've explained it.

Captain Shaw grit his jaw as he stared dead ahead, through the masses and the Covenant troops, all neatly forming into a battle line without fear. He knew this was all just foreplay: A red carpet to be rolled out in preparation for whoever represented this Covenant.

An Elite had floated down from the center of the Phantom onto the ground, and, as if she had been Moses, the sea of combat troops had all made way for her: the empty space between the Council, Humans and Covenant now open to her. Its armor had a platinum sheen to it, almost white: a half cape over one shoulder, tinged in purple and gold. Unbeknownst to the observers, the design on the cape had been the crest of her fleet: now lost to them, still over Reach.

The name of that fleet was crudely "Shaded Justice" as transcribed to humans, but in Sangheili it was more eloquent. "Justice without Recognition" or "Judgement with no Factors". The name of the fleets had been chosen with value and reason, most often than not a reflection of their Fleetmaster, or, in this case, Fleetmistress.

Seylu Karonee cared not for her gender and what it meant in a patriarchal society. Where for every one hundred male Sangheili in service to the Covenant, there had been one female, she had risen to the top by merits that could not be defined by being a female.

It mattered not who commanded ships who burned human worlds. All that mattered was that they did it well.

If anything, she did it perfectly.

Even in a fair fight, it always seemed as if she was cheating. That was her confidence, her aura. Might made right, and the justice and divine salvation she practiced by her command was without vain as so many of her fellow commanders had fallen into on behalf of religious destiny.

She did what she did without celebration, without expectation, and, as she stood there before her troops, walking before them and being the spear of that wall, she made it clear to the humans that she had been in command of that situation. Even as, behind her, a strange being in a gravity chair floated down from that same hole in luxurious red robes and a wreath as a crown.

Whatever sound emanated from the Covenant ranks silenced.

This species was observed only from the bodies. None had been collected, but their forms had been quickly collected by the Covenant when the Alliance had backed off from the initial confrontations.

Stringy, to say the least, long appendages and skin as befit an annelid, they were obviously derived from worms, and only now had the Alliance or Council seen one alive.

Proceeded by a processing of red and gold Elites, the gravity chair slowly made its way toward Karonee. Usze had stayed vigilant, patting the shoulders of two of his men to follow behind the Honor Guard.

Destiny's name was right. If this was his course in life all he could do was take it with stride, a smile on his face as he came besides Karonee and the two walked forward to the center of that dead space. With the feeling in her gut Karonee had felt at least twenty guns on her, however there was nothing she could do as her boot clinked against the metal floor and walked, slowly, to the middle.

Asari up front, Human directly by her side, while the Salarian and Turian representative had the flanks. There was an order to that, a reason. Whatever silent prayers to Gods, Goddesses, or Spirits existed, it came and went as Benezia took in her own breath, closed her eyes, and then wiped her face with a serene look.

With her step forward, they followed.

Only then did a black stick figure of a mystery also come forth from the Phantoms. It was Destiny's prelate, hovering the very back of the Covenant procession as, finally, peacefully and officially, the groups made contact with each other face to face.

Destiny had started first before the awkwardness of who went first sent in. He too had been trained as a Prophet to delegate such things.

"I understand that you have translated the language of the Elites, but you will have no difficulty with me. I know the language of humanity well enough." To see an alien speak pure human, it still kept Shaw off guard in a way that his omni-tool translator could not cover for. The alien spoke warmly, with open hands and arms. "I am the Prophet of Destiny, and I represent here the Covenant. Holy and righteous."

This was how it would've been, years ago, on Harvest. If Truth, Regret, and Mercy had not held onto that secret of humanity being the chosen of the Forerunners, if the Librarian's wish did not go against the Covenant power as it were, then now, here, was how the UNSC might've met the Covenant. It was a secret that Destiny heard in rumors and whispers. He was devout however for the most faithful reason. Not for power, or, at least, power that went contrary to the Great Journey.

That was the privilege Captain Bernard Shaw, General Vera Tailus, Matriarch Benezia, and Admiral Sirixo had entertained.

Arterius looked down from the balcony, and, for once in his life, he had to stomach being next to humans as they all stood equal and in awe of this event.

There was no need for individual introductions to each species. That was the reason for the Covenant. They were all Covenant.

Karonee had dipped her head respectfully, her half cape flowing as she moved her shoulders. "I am Fleetmaster Seylu Karonee of the Fleet of Shaded Justice, Shipmistress of the Blood of Union and now A Long Night of Solace."

Shaw had nodded at her back. "As we hear from the transmissions." He held out his hand, and, for the second time that day, a handshake was offered to a Sangheili. Karonee however knew what it meant, so she had returned it, not taking his hand, but rather his forearm in a deep hold. He had returned it as the entire hanger held their breath as, for the first time in her life, Karonee touched a human and did not proceed to kill them. "My name is Bernard Shaw. I am a Captain of the Systems Alliance, on behalf of humanity."

Soft, as always, she observed. She was smaller than most Sangheili, but still larger than most humans. If anything she was the size of one of their Demons.

Matriarch Benezia still had that graceful face on her, her hand also gingerly held out, this time to the so-called Prophet. "I am Matriarch Benezia, an Asari from our Republic. With me are General Vera Tailus of the Turian Hierarchy, and Admiral Han Sirixo of the Salarian Union." She gestured to each as lightly the Prophet took her hand and squeezed. Perhaps, if this alien conglomerate had been more… alien, more unknown, Benezia might've melded right then and there with the Prophet.

There was a danger in knowing however. In secrets not learned one way, and instead taken by another. Not every secret in the galaxy could've been ripped from the mind by embracing eternity, and perhaps that was for the best.

She would know that more than anything. Only Saren, looking down upon her knew better at that moment. The secret they carried within them now, together, had, only now been momentarily cast asides as something almost equally as… intriguing as their own dark deeds recently had come about.

The Galaxy got on just well enough without their conspiracies, and this happening was all that they needed to remember that.

"I take it all of you are held together then by your own… agreements?" Destiny rose a ridge above his eye.

"Ah yes. For all of us here but the humans, we represent the Citadel Council: a governing body whose goal is cooperation throughout the stars. Even then humanity is acquainted with us and work hand in hand with us."

She thought Destiny had smiled. "Admirable. The Covenant exists in perhaps the same manner, except our goal is far more… direct."

Arterius had glowered as he heard those words echo through the space, dead silent but for them. Malevolence he felt just by the air of his words. Whoever this Prophet was, he knew to preach, and to speak before God, for God, always had its failures. He had clicked his comm device twice, sending a signal to General Tailus to move it along. If there was a firefight there then at least the VIPs should've been out of the way.

Tailus had immediately dispensed with the pleasantries. "If we may. Let's move to our designated diplomatic accommodations. A hanger is no place for us to be… acquainted at."

Karonee turned around, spying Usze. The two had shared a knowing nod. He was in charge of all of their safety and he had the prerequisite. Even the Honor Guard respected him, despite his choice to not be one of them.

"We would be accompanied by our escort detail?" Karonee made a point.

Tailus soured, but he had no choice. "Within reason." He sent three clicks back with his comm device subtly. To Saren it simply meant observe and contain.

The Spectre was more than comfortable to just sit and stare at the menagerie as one the procession of VIPs moved into the ship through a line of at arms Marines, inward to the ship. Six Honor Gaurds and Usze had followed with two men, Nazhumee one of them.

The Honor Guards had been as regal as ever, their vibrant armor and scaled helmets pulsating glass. Their spears and staves all ready to be used at a moment's notice to swipe out at the Marines that were so, so very close to them. They had no problem being that close to humans. The problem they had was they keeping the urge to kill them in check.

They all had memories, individually of going through human corridors, killing any who had looked human without resistance in the light of their skills. Mission details however, at that very instance, had dictated their behavior by the skin of their teeth.

* * *

Ready rooms on Hackett's flagship had been spacious to say the least. Initially Alliance engineers had been so concerned with simply making a dreadnaught sized ship they hadn't been too concerned about what was within it. Hackett would've been there to personally comment on it to Destiny as his gravity chair had, unfortunately, not been able to fit through the door way to that ready room, but somehow something more important than first contact had come about and caused him to find his way on an Alliance training vessel.

Shaw could handle it however as he opened the room and several diplomats were already there. He recognized some of them from Udina's affairs, and from Shastri's office, however there had been two he hadn't: A man with a cleft on his lips and one who wore sunglasses indoors. They rose to attention as soon as the procession came in.

"Oh pay no heed to that. I am more than capable of walking myself." Destiny had touched the arms of two of his guards to stand by of the gravity chair as he dismounted, an notable hunch in his back as seen in most Prophets at even his age. The Prelate too had stayed with the chair. To walk was not something he did lightly. To those unacquainted with Destiny it might've been as if he was a homely, wise, elder of sorts. He was young for a Prophet, but for the rest of them he had been seventy.

"Are… are you sole representative for the Covenant? Prophet of Destiny?" The head human diplomatic aide to Shaw had spoken aloud, making sure seating arrangements were in order.

There were human, Asari, Turian, and Salarian guards in every corner of the room, and with the arrival of the Covenant guards they all had to stand uncomfortably shoulder to shoulder. It was a bonding experience to say the least, for those soldiers who had weathered a first contact war before.

The staves of the Honor Guard had been as straight as them.

Destiny looked to Karonee, shaking his head. "Shipmistress Karonee shall also be representative, especially in the military sense."

The human diplomat nodded as a chair was brought to her.

Human chairs had barely fit her, but she did relent as one by one the diplomats and representatives found their place at the table and sat. Unsurprisingly, mostly human given the territory, but those with the most weight had been the Council.

Shaw had sat directly across from Destiny, the table round, he flanked by General Tailus and the Council to his right, and Sunglasses and Cleft-Lip to his left.

Chairs rolled in, hands and arms moved to a comfortable place. Cameras were on somewhere as the image of a proper first contact was had.

Destiny was even smiling, Karonee folding her hands on the table politely.

Just to get dialog going again, Shaw had started.

"As started before, I am Captain Bernard Shaw of the Systems Alliance, and I have been chosen to be representative of humanity here today. I am joined by the honorable General Tailus, the honorable Matriarch Benezia, and the honorable Admiral Sirixo."

Hidden beneath the clothes of the Matriarch had been a transmitter beamed directly into Arterius's head, the man outside with his guard procession, more intent on listening than attending.

"On behalf of the Covenant," Destiny held a hand to his chest. "We are gracious for your civility, especially given our… rocky, starts. You must understand our people were scared and… unaware of your intentions upon our first contact with you."

A divide existed that went further than aluminum and glass. There were two layers of knowledge in that room: those who knew, and those who would know. That barrier was about to be broken down at some point.

Cleft Lip and Sunglasses alone had knowledge in that room among the humans and the Council. They had interviewed the Spartan and the OODST, and knew what the Covenant could do. Shaw hadn't been briefed, and the two intelligence operations were sure, sure as shit, that even the Salarians had any intel form them about it. It was the reason they stayed quiet, wariness in their breaths as they let the appointed talk. They were just here to observe.

"Regrettable, surely," Benezia had started in her motherly voice. "But here we are despite this, and we are glad that you are."

Karonee nodded in concert. "We also appreciate you returning our dead, and we would do the same for you with any we acquire without our current territory."

Territory. Tailus noted the word. It meant it was there's now. His mandibles grinded against his plates as he crossed his arms. "Your ability in ground warfare is… noted, and your honor also so."

Karonee had gone to speak, but Destiny raised his hand to speak for her. "The Sangheili, or Elites, are very much known for their honor. They are the warrior hearts of our Covenant."

Benezia understood. "Ah. Just as the Turians are for the Council."

Connection. Asari understood what that was more than anyone.

"Still," Tailus continued. "Surely you must noticed that battle lines have been drawn at the moment that deny us movement in those zones. Would you not let our people in so that we may collect any dead ourselves? So that we shall feel… safe?"

Karonee was allowed to speak again. "We would feel, uncomfortable, admittedly, General."

That was all she said, which was a polite no. Tailus heard it. "But are you aware that by claiming this as territory it is, in a sense, an aggressive modus operandi on land that is not your own?"

Shaw spoke up. "Excuse me, General Tailus. I am flattered the Turians have a vested interest in human sovereignty on its colonies, however given the circumstances I believe safe spaces are what we all need right now in light of this… shall I call it disaster? That has grounded your ship."

Shaw lost three men. Three Marines to the Covenant. He knew it demeaned him to speak as he did for the sake of civility, however humanity knowing the bigger picture had been abundantly clear ever since the First Contact War.

"It is, a long story, surely. One you might not understand, but alas we are grateful to have ended up here. I'm sure you humans have understood now by what our… circumstances are."

The three representatives of the Council had turned slightly to look at Shaw.

Cleft-Lip and Sunglasses held their breath. They could say nothing.

"I-" Shaw truly didn't understand. "I don't believe I follow, Prophet of Destiny."

"Ah. I see. Is it not odd then, that we have picked up radio transmissions that designate that we Covenant are very familiar with the human race?" Indeed this was something all of them noticed. Council, Covenant, and Alliance. "We have our own explanation of course, given you humans are not, in turn, familiar."

Karonee crossed her own arms, wary of the Turian. She recognized a soldier when in the presence of one. "By what manner do your ships propel or create energy? Our scanners indicate…" she remembered the briefing by her Engineers via their handlers. "An unidentified element perpetrates through nearly all forms of equipment as deployed by all of you, one that, if in play, effects mass readings."

Sirixio had finally spoken. "Element Zero. It's, when subjected to an electrical current, releases dark energy which can be manipulated into a mass effecting field, raising or lowering the mass of all objects within that field. As you can understand this has huge ramifications in space flight."

The very fact that he was explaining this was taken with great shock, great awe. It meant that-

"Ah. Our propulsion and space flight technology are without such material. Ours, at least, outside of FTL, is more… conventional perhaps?"

"You are… without element zero?" Benezia seemed confused. "The entire galaxy is exposed to it. To mean you are unaware, or even untouched by it would mean… you do not originate… in this galaxy?"

She went along that thought process. Element zero was present in all of the known universe. She needed to think bigger.

"It's impossible-" Shaw had regretted using that word, but continued, "to achieve meaningful FTL and spaceflight without Eezo. How-?"

"FTL is then a concept we are both acquainted with." Karonee was delegated to talk of the more pragmatic subjects. "Our FTL is, how you say… intermingled with matters of space and time. Dimensional even."

Cleft-Lip and Sunglasses remembered when they had recounted how the FTL of the Covenant and the UNSC worked. Its ramifications were large enough to throw the entire galaxy on its head.

"Dimensional?" Talius dug deeper. No mention of the Gates had piqued him. "What do you mean?"

"Our FTL, gifted upon us by our Forerunners," Destiny began to speak with his holy reverie. "Uses dimensional understandings and gaps so that we may cross large distances of space in fractions of the time. We cut into the fabric of reality and go as far as our drives can take us. Anywhere."

"Without… without prepositioning or paths?" For Benezia, this meant more than the tactical response derived from how Tailus salivated. Without the Relays, expansion, or attacks, could come from anywhere.

"Indeed." Destiny affirmed.

Karonee had recounted a very basic summary of how they ended up here. "Know that we may not be from this universe due to… accidents in regarding our FTL methods."

Shaw ruined another seat with his sweat as that revelation hit everyone in that room hard. The Covenant came from another dimension. Another reality. Another universe. Whatever it meant their rules of physics were different. They were different fundamentally.

The full breadth of such revelation could not be taken in one shock, like a punch. Its full effect could be felt only in time.

"Such knowledge would be… dangerous, given our own FTL methods-" Tailus was still hung up on the idea of Slipspace however, cut off by the Salarian Admiral.

"There is much to learn, to decipher, and to understand surely, but that is not the purpose of this meeting." Sirixo said fast. "This meeting is to declare that we would pursue such efforts."

"Which is of course, a denunciation of any hostilities and alternative recourse." Tailus pointed, one of his talons tapping once on the glass table.

"Would you agree, then, to a joint statement, declaring such? The extent of those processes and what we will learn from each other will be discussed, surely, however now it's important to establish that civility between this… galaxy, and the Covenant. We hope to do this in good faith, and for you to also respond as such." Shaw had made his case as he tried his best to hold in a breath too big for him to handle. Indeed, the Galaxy held in a breath at that room.

There was no need for conference for Karonee and Destiny. They came here with a goal: an assurance that they wouldn't be blasted out of the sky and Ocean. This was exactly what they needed. For all the politicians, diplomats, and representatives there, ready for a verbal and delegative fight. There was not one.

Destiny went, one better.

"Of course." The entire procession breathed a sigh of relief. "And to start, before we do such things, I would transfer to you data about each species we have in the Covenant. Biographical and biological."

Karonee had smirked inwardly. She had seen said packet before. It was highly doctored to remove any such mention of the human purification, but still it was needed to get across. It would be better for such information to be delivered instead of extracted.

The Salarian seemed almost estatic, thrilled. "Oh my."

Destiny could only smile back. "There is much to do! Much to do indeed. So please, how may we make this statement to declare our intent?"

The only hint that this was going better than expected came from the roundabout look that Shaw gave to his fellow diplomats. It was going better than expected and, as he stood, arms in the air, "Okay then, follow me. This ship has a press conference room."

"Splendid." Destiny replied in turn.

Everyone but two men had left that room. Sunglasses and Cleft-Lip, waiting for something promised. They had data on the Covenant, and getting information from them directly, they needed to compare instead of observe.

The information packet had been received tense minute later, and Sunglasses dipped his shades down, revealing his eyes. Within his irises had been circuitry, blue as electricity itself. The Elites had been the species he had been most interested as per the Spartan's testimony, and it was theirs that he combed over as fast as he could before finding a galactic map placing the location of the Elite homeworld. Surprising that this would be included, of all things.

Cleft Lip had frowned as he looked at the supposed coordinates of Sangheilios. The Milky Way, the stars above, the Covenant shared them with where they were now. They understood the stars perhaps better than them, and that meant, that naturally, the stars did align. There was ever, only, one planet that matched the description of Sangheilios and its general location in the galaxy. The coordinates buried it in a place in the galaxy long relegated as lost.

"Oscar," Cleft Lip started, Sunglasses looking up from the data pad. "Do we have communications with the Migrant Fleet?"

* * *

One shift each. Six hour sleep for the both of them. It led them through the night and into the next day. It was JD that had gotten the tail end of the forty winks as he had blinked himself awake, sleeping on top of sheets, looking up at an unfamiliar ceiling.

It was a trade: sleep for surveillance. They ran their shifts and saw, not any intruders or those that would do them harm while4 they had their guard down, but they saw each other.

Their faces frowned and twitched in their sleep, both of them plagued by the war that had been yesterday. The dead were lucky, said an ODST once to JD. They never had to deal with the dreams, the nightmares, that were the only distraction from a horrible war. He was an easy sleeper ever since he joined the Corps, and he was thankful for it. Anytime, anywhere, he could plop himself down and sleep. It came with a trade off however as Mai silently observed:

Every once and a while, just to remind him, he had a dream. He dreamt of battlefields he had gone before, battles lost, comrades dead. He was there, again, on the field with an M7S in his hand charging against some enemy or objective that would surely kill fifty men before it could be tackled. It changed every time, it always snuck up on him, but when it came to him he always knew he had dropped into a nightmare.

He saw it: Men swallowed alive in plasma explosions, soldiers sinking into dirt or quick sand or a sea of bodies reaching their hands out screaming to him.

"Help me!"

They all pleaded for their lives.

JD would've. He would've.

But his hands became heavy, his legs never moving, the battlefield around him disregarding him as he bore witness to men and women around him cry out to him for help, but he being unable to do anything.

The dreams never ended abruptly or with a snap. They took him into the black as, every single time, he remembered that the reason he had those dreams were abundantly clear: He was always the survivor, the lone man who, perhaps, could've done something.

JD had been haunted by what had been done to him.

Mai had been haunted by what she had done.

He had never seen someone's hands and arms move so much as her body rolled, her eyes behind her lids scattering everywhere as if she was still in the middle of a fight.

She dreamt of the knife twisting into human flesh for eternity. She dreamt of a Covenant Elite who, no matter how much she tore apart, stabbed, shot, and beat, it would never die. She dreamt of the kill, and nothing else, and when, every time, she realized that was what her life had been resigned to, she woke up.

"You okay there, Marine?"

He heard her voice as he sat up in bed. He moved his head right, and she had still sat in that corner, keeping the door in her vision. Her hands had been tucked into her arms, crossed over herself, the realization that there truly was nothing there coming to harm them creating an emotion on her face like that of a moon in a starless sky.

He shook his head yes, moving the spit in his mouth, getting rid of the cotton feeling as he reaffirmed where he was: A hotel room, on Earth, a universe away from home.

"We were displaced by a Slipspace anomaly, placing us in another reality, and we are now in the hands of an Earth government called the Systems Alliance." She said those words aloud, as if for no reason. "Is that it? Is that truly what has happened to us?"

A hard pill to swallow that only the processing of sleep could let them take.

The blinds were closed, and he had made a grab at them, letting the natural light of a town at (he glanced at the clock built into his omni-tool) mid-day. Mai had wanted to advise him that, maybe, there were Jackal snipers maybe about to take his head off. She reeled back however. It simply wasn't true. They were impulses however she could barely ignore.

Out distantly JD could see past the modern, urban development of steel buildings and glass had been the mist kicked up by a tourist destination he knew of: Niagara Falls. Couldn't see the falls, but saw what it kicked up in the distance, the moisture getting kicked around by the System Alliance's form of shuttle. It looked like any other busy day in a smaller metropolis. He never spent much time in such cities. That is, he hadn't spent much time in cities that hadn't been in the middle of being glassed or invaded.

"Played around with the omni-tool. Apparently, we're wired into some sort of Systems Alliance Expenditures Account. These things act as our ID and payment method apparently."

Good ole service allowances. JD had, for a moment, soured at the thought he had left so much extra cash in his account. The last he remembered in his will, if he were to die any of his possessions would go to half-way homes for kids whose parents had been locked up or otherwise missing, so he hadn't minded what would happen to the funds. It wasn't as if he used it anyway. He lived simply.

"Did you…" He wondered where this conversation was going to go as he let the sunlight warm him. This was his first time underneath the sun on Earth and he had wanted to feel it, opening up the glass door to the balcony, but not stepping out. "Did you receive a pay as a Spartan?"

Her face went blank, staring unknowingly beyond the hotel room, into her own deep knowledge of her own affairs.

"I was never concerned with money." She answered truthfully. It wasn't the answer he was looking for.

"Wasn't what I was asking." JD said back, and she understood. The UNSC, ONI, the Spartan Program, surely that they had cost their members a great deal. What did they do in return? A formality of pay at least, he thought, but apparently not.

"I don't know." She answered back. With the idea of money considering he could only remember the obnoxious mark up for hotel food. They both needed to eat eventually, to get ready to fulfill Anderson's orders. Better get started than let it come out of necessity.

"Well, I'd rather we go out to eat now that we're both up. Or at least, I dunno, hit up some bodega and grab some food so we can, I dunno, lock ourselves in here and get reading."

"Bodega?"

To be fair even some of his other ODSTs hadn't known that word. The cities of Luna often drew from New York City in a way. Then again JD hadn't talked much, if at all to them casually. "Convivence store, I mean."

"Ah." She breathed before looking down at her feet. She hadn't removed her boots even as she slept, always ready to move at a moment's notice. "Hey."

"Yeah?"

"Can you-" She had trouble putting this into words. "Could you… assist me in-"

JD rose an eyebrow, lifting himself off the bed, his muscles and bones creaking, unused to sleeping on a proper bed. It was certainly a nice experience to say the least. He hadn't tried to complete her sentence, guide her, it wasn't his place he thought. What that meant however she struggled.

"It's been a while since I've… walked the streets in this manner."

Even that sounded contrived. He didn't know however; didn't know the life she was denied. Any oddity in her interactions with people he had summed up as simply an effect of the war: of forgetting how to deal with other people in lieu of surviving the Covenant. He understood that very much. He had spoken more in the last few days than he had in a year, but however he was so painfully wrong.

She wanted to somehow explain to him that, yes, she had never been a civilian per se. That the UNSC had taken advantage of her at a period in her life where she was supposed to know how to buy groceries or start forming adult relationships.

Who could've faulted her though?

How easy was it admit that you were broken, incomplete to not only yourself, but to another person?

How easy was it to admit when that particular information was top secret?

A matter for later as JD understood enough that she was asking for help in some way, going for the hotel door himself, opening it a crack and seeing, neatly, a green and grey square of folded clothing, tossing it over to Mai. She caught it without realizing she did.

"I rung up house service while you were out. Got you something a little more useful then sweat pants and a hoodie."

It was just a BDU's underlay. Not unlike the green layer JD had beneath his ODST armor. A little more utilitarian, rugged, than usual casual clothes, combat pants and a shirt with it, but it was wearable out and about in an area with a military facility in it. If anything, it was something she would be comfortable wearing he thought.

"Save that current outfit for sleep anyway. I think the hotel staff will handle laundry? I don't know."

Mai had her hands already on the folds of clothes and, again, without pause, her clothes had been off. Standard issue underwear had been hiding her for the most part this time around, though still, JD had looked away after he realized what she had done again. Every time however he gathered something new about her body:

Faded scars, along her wrists, her spine, her neck, as if she had been once exhumed and came out of it. JD had seen scars before, seen the wounds that make them, but seeing hers there was a pang of worry in his heart. What had the UNSC done to her?

Haphazardly she folded her discarded clothes, the t-shirt she wore unable to hide the scars.

JD had slid off his flannel to her, offering. She didn't understand however.

"Why would I?"

One of his fingers traced along his own veins, and Mai, perhaps for the first time in a while, had seen what he was referring to. She hadn't exactly remembered the last time she had been out of her tech suit for long enough to concentrate on what was beneath it. He could see his point: People would've stared.

She took his flannel, a dull red and grey squared affair. Tight, but it fit. She didn't look that bad, and the jeans and white shirt for him was lazily fashionable hopefully. The presumed TV screen which had been ingrained into the wall was black, off, but still reflective on its matte. The dull image of himself had been odd: He didn't look like a Marine. He looked like his father on weekends.

He would always be a Marine though, regardless of his impromptu posting as a Navy Chief.

That was true as he had made the hand signal for her to rally on him, albeit only with his hand and not with his arm.

If he had been told a week ago that he'd be, somehow, leading a Spartan, he would've very much dismissed the notion.

Then again everything about the last few days had been out there, logically.

He had half expected when he went to sleep that he would've woken back up on the Savannah for another drop on some place on Reach currently under siege by the Covenant. That hadn't happened however and so all he could do was take in a breath and hope that this reality could be kinder to him.

More importantly, he thought, perhaps more kind to her.

She had moved closer to him, enough that he had to look promptly up to look at her face and to see if she was going to follow him. Her face was hollow with emotion, none there, her eyes stealing his own gaze with just how their color seemed so electric it was impossible.

"Would you rather stay? I can go out myself and get what we need?"

Her face contorted again as if she fought a battle within herself in that millisecond. "No." She said promptly. "I want to go with you."

'I need to get used to this' It sounded more like to both of them.

In truth that was what JD had intended to do as well. This wasn't a quick stop to the ship's commissary for some melatonin when his mind screamed at him for sleep but his body wouldn't allow. This was just what he would've done if he were a civilian again, and one day would be, and had been too lazy to go grocery shopping.

It almost felt like they had been prepping for a drop themselves as they looked to the door. That was the pressure building in their minds as they were to embark on something so benign as a food run. It would be a step toward accepting that, maybe, just maybe, they truly were freed from the war and whatever that meant.

That door represented more than an exit to that room. It represented the way to the rest of their lives.

JD's right hand rose up in a first, looking at her again.

She nodded back, her own fist risen.

One pump, two pump, three pump.

Rock beats scissors.

The ODST looked dismayed when he lost, but Mai knew better. He had deserved at least two out of three.

Rock still beat scissors however. Twice.

She had tilted her head at him. "Really?" She wanted to tell him.

He shrugged. Paper could be played another day, and it meant that Mai was on point. It was a little less painful stepping into the hall this time.

* * *

After asking the attendants at the lobby, the nearest convenience store was just down the street.

New Buffalo had expanded quite a bit from Buffalo, up to Niagara Falls even. It meant a healthy pipeline of tourists to the economy and, promptly, a fair enough domestic trading post between the former independent Canadian states and the United States. The history of Earth was something they had to consider, to know, if there had been any ethical or theological differences that Mai and JD would have to take into consideration. If, for example, this humanity had turned into a group of functional cannibals, there would be a problem.

As far as they could tell though the democratic, utopian like ideals of the UEG brought by space flight was the same here with the Systems Alliance.

That much was abundantly clear when they emerged out into the street in front of the hotel to a busy foyer and entrance, sky cars being cycled out from guests leaving or arriving, chauffeurs and attendants bringing luggage and guests in as JD and Mai walked out to the cool air.

"Thank you for your service!" They heard softly from a older woman they passed, chasing, slowly, after presumably, her grandson in his own dress blues as their family entered the hotel.

JD's dog tags could be seen through his white shirt, and Mai had dressed obviously military like.

The lady meant well, but there was a hint of uncomfortableness that shrunk the two of them as they were bestowed with that comment. As a Spartan, Mai needed no thanks especially. As an ODST that, more often than not, was meant to die behind enemy lines, to be thanked for that service felt… unneeded.

They brushed it off eventually as they found the sidewalk out of the hotel, following the street as their eyes began to unconsciously scan the rooftops, the windows (open ones especially), looking down alley ways and placed they could find cover in or at. JD had caught himself doing it, frowning as he walked. That was how his mind had been now programmed as they brushed past civilians who had not yet known what a war in their species was like.

For a flash, he hated himself for it. It wasn't normal.

Mai found nothing wrong with it. If anything it comforted her to know that she had enough tactical options if, for some reason, a Hunter had burst out of a sewer drain.

The only thing she realized when they had almost gotten to the corner down the street was that this was, indeed, her first time, her first taste, of being an adult outside of military activity. There was nothing military about what they were doing. Nothing about how she always had an itch to twist her head around and check her six, or how she hugged the buildings closer than JD even if it disrupted the flow of foot traffic.

She was a giant, comparatively, anyway. No one would get in her way.

She wondered, in the portion of her mind so unused she had doubted it existed, if this was what she would've been like if the Covenant War had been won, back in their universe. What would've been done to her?

She gaffed at it however. She doubted she would've lived as long to see the end of the war. And besides, she knew, she felt in her heart, the Insurrection would always return in some way or another, and there would always be a need for her.

It was comfortable to think that, as a weapon, she would always find use.

It was purpose that only the luckiest to live life would hardly ever know.

It was drifting away like sand through a sieve as she saw the windowed buildings she was basically hugging in their walk give way to a corner store:

"Indian-Hispanic Grocery!" It exclaimed on its shaded windows. "Best Chopped Cheese and Buffalo Chicken Bites at our price!"

'The hell is a Chopped Cheese?' A question she never thought would cross her mind as JD, for some reason, understood and figured it was too early for such a thing.

"I'll stick by the door."

_I'll take up security._

Her words always had different meaning as she struggled to tear away from military rhetoric. JD knew better the intricacies of talk and words. Words meanings always could change based on their circumstance, and more often than not, was the reason why his father could deduct so much from an off hand comment that literally saved lives.

'No need.' He mouthed as they entered the bodega. She stayed by the door anyway and, for a moment, he thought that whoever employees were inside of this small store might've interpreted this as a stick up.

An ethnic man had been, lazily, at the counter, a cup of coffee he had made for himself from a machine in the store barely steaming. He looked up from his omni-tool, some crude viral video being displayed on it as he smiled simply at JD and Mai, acknowledging their presence before returning to his vid.

Mai certainly wasn't going to be the one to start going through that rustic looking store for food, so, with a hardened sigh, JD had gone onto it and the meek handful of aisles and adorned shelved walls and freezers the store offered.

It was a simple matter of not knowing what the hell branding any of it was. He recognized none of it initially as he walked up and down, the realization that he might not recognize anything internally scaring him straight and awake.

Words like, dextro-amino, levo had been plastered on some stickers of things that looked like sliced meat, and, vaguely, the food items he had been familiar with had been still around though labeled oddly at first glance. Bottles of seemingly goo-like sustenance packages along with vegetables infused with words he had barely recognized, 100% GMO promises clashing with "grown in zero-g" or being sourced from planets he didn't know. His mind had played tricks on him, finding what was unfamiliar first, a vague panic attack on the verge of taking him as he felt the sweat on his face.

_Simple food_, he told himself, _simple food_. _Peanut butter and jelly_. _Need bread._

'_None of that chocolate spread. It'll make you fat, and you were a fat baby already.'_ He heard Mom in his head chastise a younger him for basically lathering a piece of toast with desert.

He wished his Mom was here now. It was an odd thought that seized him as his body moved on auto-pilot, as if his mother was guiding his body. He hadn't thought of his parents, of Mom, like that for a while, and especially when he had been scared out of his mind because of the war at times, on battlefields where he was sure that he was going to die at.

It made sense though vaguely, he never grocery shopped alone before. She always handled it. Perhaps that was why he had thanked his mother in heaven when he found himself back in the bread aisle and something directly in front of his vision, eye height.

It was a beacon of hope that was summed up in the saying that the more things did change, the more some stayed the same: _**Wonder Bread**_. A loaf, packaged in plastic, just like it had been for, to him, the last five hundred years. He had almost wanted to cheer when he recognized it before, again, the existential question came:

How much history had they shared with the Systems Alliance?

A question he hadn't given time to think as he started to recognize the brands and, each time, a victory was given to him:

Skippys! Smuckers! Cheerios! Pop-Tarts! He looked over to the refrigerator: Coca-cola and Monster! Pizza-Rolls!

Each name he recognized was a relief. The branding might've been different, fonts and colors, but the item was the same.

With almost too much pride he had arrived at the counter, an armful of bread loaves, peanut butter and jelly jars, and packaged slice meat. Not even a shopping basket. To feel those familiar items against him was nice and he was sure if he were to admit that to anyone he would be in the loony bin as soon as possible.

"This all?" The cashier asked as he turned off his omni-tool's video player, only to swipe the device over each product.

The ODST went to say yes, but a flash of color, harsh, but also familiar had appeared on a box hardly the size of a wallet behind the cashier. Behind a glass cabinet alongside similar objects that one needed to ask for.

Marlboro Reds. Same as they always were. He hadn't been a smoker by want, but rather by need. It wasn't the tobacco dependency as much as it had been the cigarette's ability to keep him awake during choice moments in the war, when his body just wanted to drag him screaming to the black. Either way he smoked, and he saw the benefits of something familiar to be in between his lips.

"Can I have the Reds?"

"Yeah, sure. New in town?" The Indian clerk had asked. JD could only nod as he passed the box of cigarettes over the counter first. The food came after.

"Something like that."

The clerk had rung up his device on his end, and the omni-tool on JD's arm had rung and vibrated for but a moment. The man had seized up for a moment, not expecting it. He had immediately ascertained it to be something benign and normal, but the guise of being used to such a sensation had faltered beneath an uneasy smile he gave the concerned looking clerk. JD mused that, perhaps, he looked like some doped out junkie with his flannel and bed head and shakes.

"Coffee really hitting ya, huh?" Fortunately, the clerk hadn't seen it that way as JD shot a look at Mai, she herself making a mental note that the omni-tool would do such a thing when processing a purchase. It didn't help that the clerk tilted his head at his device, the ODST immediately fearing he did something wrong. It wasn't that however. "I see you're servicemembers. Are you staying at the hotel by the station?"

JD bobbed his head.

"May I have these sent to your room?"

"Uh, yeah. That'd be nice." He caught the cigarettes first however, safely in his hands. "Room 613."

"Got it, it'll be there when you get back. Have a nice day."

"You too." It was odd to simply leave the groceries he had just bought, but he had taken the man's word for it as they both exited the building and back to the street. What had been five minutes felt an hour, and breaths they both held unknowingly were let go as if they were being tested.

To be around so much food, Mai was almost overwhelmed. On one hand her senses of just bare food filled her nose that even a UNSC mess hall couldn't. Foods that hadn't been military standard had often been prized among Marines, and she smelled so much candy, so much snacks, it had almost overwhelmed her.

There was another bit to her however, one that made her swipe the sleeve of JD's flannel over her forehead and seeing an uncomfortable amount of wetness on it. Once, long ago, she never had enough to eat. Despite the efforts of her own mother, they couldn't afford food from even a convenience store. This was once a wealth and luxury that a Mai before her Spartan life couldn't imagine and was outright denied.

Remembering that had iced her heart in a way she hadn't felt in years, when she was new to the armor, to her role, and still holding onto what she once was.

A wrapper was ripped open and the smell of tobacco had filled her nose as she turned over to JD and saw him open up a pack of cigarettes.

"You smoke?" There was a hint of disapproval in her voice.

He did, as was why his body naturally moved as if he was going to reach for a lighter in his pocket, realizing that he hadn't, leaving him with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. "Mhmm." He grunted, aggravation grinding his quiet voice. "I don't think smoker's lung will be the thing that'll get me, Mai."

He only knew the word cancer because of his recent medical training. Cancer had been some archaic disease that had been mostly eradicated by the 2500s, and the genome for it to exist at all had more or less disappeared, which, by all means, meant that JD was safe to smoke for what benefits tobacco had at the risk of tar.

What otherwise he was implying, and meant more likely, that he was to be most likely killed by an alien, not an illness.

She didn't know of any Spartans who smoked. None from the IIIs, or the IIs.

A handful of times she had worked with IIs, them unaware of her, either because she hadn't been seen by them, or because they had only assumed she was a II they hadn't been particularly close to.

She didn't see why a Spartan would, smoking disrespecting the body, and the body of a Spartan's, or even any servicemember's while active, was not their own. It was that of their military. Even then she could only assume what a Spartan would be like if they smoked. Too strong were the impulses of tobacco and the taste of smoke that it might've overwhelmed them and their own "improved" senses.

That alone she had felt as she smelled the secondhand from JD as he puffed his first puffs.

"I-" He paused. He didn't know why he was telling her this. "I usually don't smoke before eating something but-"

She nodded at him before he finished. It's been a long few days.

Civilian foot traffic around them had been, unnerving at first. As usual people had taken a look at Mai for one reason or another, either for a look in one sense, or a look in awe of a woman who had appeared so built, so tall, that it defied feminine notions. She hadn't noticed such lookers, she never had known of it, never cared, but in any eventuality the presence of crowds of people and their talk and just simple existence had been weathered as they stood there outside of that bodega.

"Could go for brunch." Another word she didn't recognize. He had recognized the face on her when she had a question. "…You know, lunch and breakfast. Brunch?"

She bared her teeth, almost in a frown as her arms drew around herself again, crossing, shrinking herself almost. "And, it could, you know, give us a lay of the place. We are going to be here for two weeks."

_Observe our battle space. Find contingencies. Account for what ifs._

Her gaze softened. That she could agree to as she opened up her own omni-tool. She was also busy while JD slept, revealing a map and opening, JD mirroring the steps she had used to open up that app. "Diner, three hundred yards north east, back past the hotel."

It was an odd way to say "there's a place here we could go" but he understood, pocketing his cigs, leaving one in his mouth as he led the way.

They walked in silence, obviously together, but uncomfortably so, strangers in their own skin as they contested with average people going about their day and dressing so very differently than the civilians they knew. The outfits in popularity fit tighter, more hugging of the figure and, ironically, futuristic than those JD recognized.

Given that certain brands still existed he wondered if the designers of clothes here had existed back home, and that simply the luck of the draw had made them be popular over those who he knew had been.

Then again, they were several hundred years in the past.

That mystery would be for later. Now they just needed to eat as they entered a down and dirty diner, JD done with his cigarette and discarding it before entering. "Preserved from the 2050s! In the style of the 1930s!" A sign on its glass read.

Red and whites, bar stools and leather seats and booths.

Paper hats and the smell of grease. It was just after lunch. Enough of a crowd left over from that rush, but enough for it to be comfortably occupied. Not too full or empty. At least for there to be two open bar stools at that diner's main counter, a grill and staff behind it.

"What can I get ya darlings?" A woman about forty years too old and three different accents away from saying that without drawing some sort of odd reaction to first-timers had greeted them. She meant it purely however, with a smile, her apron with stains, smelling of coffee and bacon. She slid two tablets their way: a digital menu offered.

Prices. Mai had seized again for a moment. Fortunately credits had been, at least name wise, the same for the Alliance as it had been for the UNSC, and JD at least had the knowledge that twelve credits (or 11.99 credits) of bacon, eggs, and toast was about what he expected in a tourist destination in a clearly novelty diner. For Mai however, it was all so- so… expensive. So expensive it stole the air from her lungs. She wouldn't know prices. She never had to buy anything in her life as a Spartan, and before she had become one, a two-credit soda was a treat she could only have a month.

That is if they were lucky.

It felt irresponsible to buy this it felt to her. It felt wrong. She felt ashamed as she looked at the big, juicy, twenty-eight-credit steak, eggs and poutine meal and, maybe, just maybe, she would buy that. It fit about half her regular caloric intake for the day, but she never seen food with a price label next to it before.

For twenty-eight credits, in another life, her and her mother wouldn't have gone hungry for an entire month if they were smart and the food bank was kind and the store owners who would let vagrants like them in would allow them to buy and-

These were the questions that she was to face now. It hit her hard. More like it would come and, for that moment as she looked at a order, she had the asinine thought of ordering up a battle and a pistol and to see if she could fight instead of eat.

Silently, and even with her misgivings, she had tapped the steak meal and the lady behind the counter had nodded, taking a notepad and writing it down with a pencil. "Oh it's just for show, don't worry about me getting it wrong." She winked at the two of them. She was referring to using a notepad for taking an order. "How would you like your steak dear?"

"…What?"

She was unfamiliar with the question.

"You can have it rare, medium-rare, medium, well done." She said fast. So fast that even Mai had problems comprehending words that made no sense to her.

"Uh. Well-done."

JD could only cringe as he saw a Spartan ruin a steak and he could do nothing about it. God help him if that was truly how she preferred her beef.

"And you?"

"Hash, salted, covered, smothered and peppered. Waffles, and a side of bacon… Coffee too, dark as you can."

Mai heard JD place his order and more words she didn't understand.

"Coming right up… did you want anything to drink?" The server threw Mai back into the deep end.

"Uh-" Unprepared. "What he's having."

"Ah, drink what the sweetheart drinks now do ya?" She teased. "Oh I was like that with my first husband, all we drank was hazelnut iced coffee… with a shot of whiskey. Anyway coming right up!"

She screamed the order to a cook barely five feet away and their order was on that classic grill, leaving JD and Mai to process what the woman said as, five seconds later, she returned with two mugs and a dark pot of coffee, filling both cups and passing 'em over.

The steam from it was pleasant to Mai as she felt the hotness in her hand that would've otherwise burned a regular person. She could stand the heat.

"Back when I was young," JD started as he looked into his own mug. "I used to drink what the receptionist had on the pot for all the detectives and officers at the station… it was, strong, so watch out."

"-'ve never had coffee." She murmured.

JD blanked at her. "Not even the powdered stuff from MREs?"

She shook her head. "Never needed it."

The lingering effects of the tobacco rush had mixed well with the coffee as he took his first sip. Still too hot, but what his throat needed. Mai hadn't expected how it burned, but not making a fuss out of it. The only way JD had noticed was from the way she grit her teeth and tensed the hand holding her mug. She coughed as she tasted the linger flavor. Her face had flashed with a hint of disgust.

"It's a- a required taste."

Just by being there he had gleamed that Earth here and the Earth he knew had, likely, shared the same 1930s aesthetic. It helped that this kind of nostalgic throwback had been imbued with comfort and smells that were meant to warm people. Even the TVs were retro… albeit a little anachronistic for the theme of the diner. They were, supposedly, old CRT models but with new inners.

The UNSC often beamed the military stations to the ships and bases he was stationed on alongside regular civilian networks, and now, the TVs had shown just about the same content. One TV had shown some animal racing event, "Varren" they both could glimpse. The beasts fit the name. Another had been good, human Baseball from a planet called "Terra Nova". The last one had been interesting however: Alliance News Network. Talking heads spoke indistinctly over the diner's volume as a banner below them read: Incoming remarks from the Alliance Admiralty and Council at the top of the hour.

Top of the hour was fifteen minutes.

They were both interested, even without mentioning it to each other. They had a hunch it might've involved them.

Food came first however, and it came well.

* * *

"Military discount, right?" The server lady had asked them, smudging her lipstick as she bit the pencil and instead going for her omni-tool that emanated from a bracelet on her arm.

"Uh- We can pay full price. Don't worry."

The server winked at them. "Military discount it is then, enjoy your meal!"

Utensils had appeared out of thin air next to the ceramic plates, the food before Mai silencing her as if she was looking at a body. It was a lot of food and a big plate compared to JD's. Even with the diner saving space on it by almost layering poutine and the egg on top of her t-bone steak. JD's meal certainly looked a little more presentable.

Then again, they could hardly care as JD had ceased with the pleasantries and took hold of said utensils. Same hard light as the omni-tool apparently. He ate comfortably, having eaten before at restaurants surely. It was an experience that Mai herself hadn't known. Not as she uneasily looked around her shoulders, looking for some excuse perhaps to not eat. It didn't seem right.

Only the realization that she had paid for it that overridden such a feeling, chowing down and, almost disregarding of taste, knew what steak well done, dark coffee, and cheese curds and fries tasted like together in her mouth.

Wasn't the best taste, but again, to her, it was hearty and tasted well enough.

She ate for consumption, not for taste anyway. MJOLNIR fed her her own shit and piss anyway so anything was a step up.

This wasn't to say that, eventually, as she realized she wasn't eating how everyone else was eating, that she didn't enjoy the food.

"We're not in a rush, you know." JD quietly spoke, making triangles of his waffles, biting intermittently at the paddy of fried hash.

They were done with a few seconds to spare before that news alert at the top of the hour came about, JD more than happy just to finish off his copy and find out how to actually tip on his omni-tool as it happened. He was occupied with the rigors of omni-tool usage that he hadn't seen Mai's gaze go deep into the television before she, by the skin of her teeth, barely contained herself.

"-It is unclear whom or by what means information about the situation over the colony of Altis has spread over media and social networks, however we are here to address that now."

"_This is Captain Bernard Shaw of the SSV Perugia, and, amazingly, what appears to be a new alien species besides him. Let's watch." _Said the newscaster_  
_

The words 'new alien species' had been enough to floor everyone in the diner to immediately direct their attention to the TV with the ANN on, the grills and other TVs flipped to synchronized.

"You know it was inevitable." Said one patron of the diner. "Damn Attican is so big there's sure to be new species around."

"Ugliest one yet it seems." Another patron responded casually.

It was only because that they had been both special forces that Mai and JD recognized the species that stood alongside Shaw and several other alien species in a press conference room, televised to the galaxy. That earthily skinned, shriveled, long neck son of a bitch had been a San'Shyuum. A holy leader of the Covenant. A Prophet.

If this was their world the sight of a Prophet alongside a human speaking cordially would've been madness.

Here it was business as usual as the words the Prophet spoke droned out to JD and Mai upon the realization that the Alliance had made some sort of agreement, some sort of peace, with the Covenant. Their blood boiled hotter than their coffee as the thought of it rang in their ears. If they had listened, the Prophet of Destiny alongside representatives of the Council and the Systems Alliance had said this:

* * *

"**I am the Prophet of Destiny, representative of a holy alliance known as the Covenant. As you would understand it, we have been space faring for a period of time since before the Human Race's formation of a modern civilization. However, despite this, only now have we been introduced to you and **_**this galaxy**_** at large now over a planet in Systems Alliance space called "Altis" due to circumstances to be elaborated on later.**

**We are new to this world of yours, but we are not young. From where we hail we possess such great power and knowledge of our domain that you must not mistake us for a collective which has stumbled its way into spaceflight and communication with you. Consider us rather, lost.**

**Who we are will be made available in the coming times, in this… Age of Reclamation, however know that we come in peace, and, despite early setbacks with first contact with both humanity and then the wider galactic community known as the Council, we seek nothing but understanding.**

**Though I may be one species, San'Shyuum, know that I represent eight, nearly now doubling the amount of spaceflight capable species recognized in your galaxy by the Citadel Council.**

**There is much to take in: our names, our beliefs, our history, but know that we too are now faced with the same thing from you, and I can only say so much in this one transmission.**

**For the time being, we submit to the Systems Alliance and the Citadel Council in cooperation and a mutually beneficial partnership as we, graciously, let the Galaxy assist us in finding a place in this universe!"**

* * *

As if giving a holy sermon, Destiny had risen one finger up to proclaim this: "_**Every Great Journey begins with a single step.**_"

That was the final image as that press conference was dispersed and folded back to the ANN news desks and the correspondents as speculation started flying. The same speculation started flying through the diner as patrons spoke of the excitement, and wariness, of a new races being introduced to the galactic community.

JD wished that, at that moment, like some detectives did, he had some whiskey to insert into the remainder of his coffee as he, as a soldier does, deferred the decisions of high command onto themselves. He trusted they knew what they were doing.

Mai wouldn't have it as he heard her seething, in breath, through her teeth.

"Why don't they just kill them all. They should know _**what they bring**_." To hear infuriation from her, it bordered on fire from a woman who was not used to holding it back. She was constantly boiling beneath her skin, and this was the first time she was denied it, humanity telling themselves a lie.

She turned away from the screen, lifting herself off the seat before JD could do anything.

She was out the door before JD left his seat, and, frantically, he had taken off after her. The fact that it was known that the diner had TVs didn't help him on the way out as people on the street flooded into the diner to gleam a look of the news. Images of the Covenant species were thrown up on screen, as provided by the Covenant themselves.

The first time that images of the aliens known as the Covenant had been broadcast in human space, it had come with a message:

_ **Your destruction is the will of the gods, and we are their instrument.** _

He spotted her over the crowd, heads taller, but far away. She was going somewhere he knew. She wouldn't be someone to storm off without a place to go to.

He fell back into his old maneuvers as he broke through the crowd trying to get in.

He was more his father's child than anything.

"_Become a cop, my dear."_ Said his mother. It would've deferred him from service in the UNSC. _"Your father taught you everything her knew."_

Stealth training or not, even by a grade of a Spartan, it was kept up with as JD followed with his intuition. That and she was constantly a head taller than anyone else in a crowd she had manically tried to phase into, trying to wade away. It wasn't a chase. He was just tailing her as the buildings melted away into forest, and the rush of people was covered by that of water. The city had become busy in an uproar as, again, humanity had come to face another alien species. To any other person it would've been a huge event, historical, and the usual xenophobic, xenophilic, militant, isolationist, or accepting thought would come.

Only two people on planet Earth hadn't cared.

One of them was concerned for the well being of the other as he found himself on a hiking trail.

He wasn't necessarily hiding, but maybe he should've as he tailed Mai from several dozen yards away. Only when they were pretty deep in the trail did she finally look back and, even from that distance away, locked eyes with him. She knew he was following, but wouldn't do anything about it.

She just needed to be away from a people who responded the wrong way to the Covenant. It would've made her vomit just to be in the presence of people who were staring into the faces of those who would doom the humanity she knew with, not skepticism, but rather peace.

He had panicked for a moment as she took off that beaten path, trees overhead having replaced the buildings. She moved fast, and far enough, away that nature surrounded them in its continental fervor of cool colors and foliage. He lost sight of her, but quickly found her as he kept her presumed bearing into the forests to the edge of a river bank, rocky and undisturbed.

* * *

He couldn't ask her why she had just bolted off. He knew why very dearly.

She sat in the water, her combat pants waterproof, but unable to beat back the soaking as she let the cold feeling go through her backside and legs, curled up into her chest. The bank was hardly deep, even with a rather fast river just beyond the safety of it.

These were the rivers that led into the Falls further down, and right now Mai's mind had been that of a waterfall.

She began to speak. "We spend these two weeks finding out how FTL works, basic mechanisms of their shuttles and ships. I was a pilot, I can fly. We procure weapons, find a way to get my armor back. Chart our way back to Altis, and then get to work. This Alliance, this humanity, is making a mistake."

"Mai…" JD stepped into the banks himself as he tried to move closer to her. She hadn't moved where she sat but she still kept her back to him as she continued to speak darkly, husk in her breath.

"We were trained to do this. Kill Covenant. It's what we have to do. It's the right thing to do. The Alliance will know what they've done wrong once th-"

"Mai." JD said again.

"-ey find out that dealing with them is only them gaming their unfamiliarity. If they gain space transport with capable FTL then we lose track of any hostile elements. They'll scout, find a place to regroup away from their eyes. We've seen the tactics and equipment the Alliance uses they are in no-"

"_Mai."_

"**WHAT?!"**

She snapped at him, standing up, fists curled, one motion toward him. He was a traitor, treasonous to even entertain letting this be. Those thoughts blew through her head like a bullet as JD backpedaled on one foot. A Spartan had stepped to do him harm and he had never felt less like a soldier then and there. Fear striking his heart like lightning as Mai saw it in his open mouth, his eyes, the way his arms were just short of moving up to defend himself.

Frozen in time with the environment around them going on its merry way. Only a strand of hair knocked by the breeze had moved on Mai as she bared her teeth in anger at JD before realizing what she was doing.

It was so easy to transgress against fellow man for her. It was a reason why she had been Lone Wolf. Working with other people was… dangerous for her, and for them.

Seconds passed. Minutes. Spartan Time kicked in for her. She couldn't control it when her mind called for it. JD had wiped the look of fear from his face in slow motion to her, eyes narrowing, jaw tightening, a gulp of air passing by his throat as he looked at her in disappointment as well.

"Mai." He said again, softer. His voice slackened her own form as she realized what she had just done.

"I-… I."

No words needed to be said as she breathed again air that people on other worlds would pay a premium for. It was the purest air she ever breathed. The air she breathed from her suit was processed, filtered, unnatural but serving its purpose to her. She could only remember that she was on Earth now.

"Slow down. Calm down. _**Please**_."

He wasn't talking to another human at that moment, he was talking to a monster made of man.

More black strands of hair fell onto her face, her eyes widening as she began to nod to herself.

Yes. Yes. He was right.

She turned back to the river, her fists uncurling, trying to let nature calm her.

Wet footsteps. The ODST walked forward, just barely behind her, and yet besides her at the same time.

"I'm used to fast. I am. I move fast when I'm alone." It was a hollow explanation. An explanation nonetheless.

Everything, everything about the last few days, it was fast for what it was. To be picked up, deposited into another reality, told everything that they knew was wrong, and told to leave their old lives behind, it all went by them like a blur. If they had been shot dead on Ardent Prayer, or blipped into non-existence, that would've been easy.

What they had been just assigned to do, wasn't easy. Far from easy. The speed of the events didn't help when they finally slowed down and forced to deal with their actions, to deal with themselves. The waters of the Niagara River had been clear, reflective of both of them as they stood on the edge of that inlet, rocky bottoms coming in slowly to dryness. They stood in the middle of it, their shoes wet, but not submerged.

"We can't move that fast you know. We shouldn't." He responded, hardly any emotion in his voice. Maybe a hint of understanding. "We have _**orders.**_"

It was peaceful, and it stung at them like a feeling unknown, a cold burn coming in through their noses and into their hearts.

"I always end up alone, you know." The man said after some time, letting Mai take it to calm herself. JD had reached down to a rock, a skippable example, throwing it out on the waters and lost to the current. He had an arm from throwing grenades, not throwing ball with Dad. Mai had looked at him from the side as he spoke out to the waters, picking up a handful of rocks in one hand, slinging them across the waters. Four skips. Three skips. Then four again. Never five. He shot for five as he skipped. "I don't know why, though I always am."

"Luck?"

According to Ambrose, all the luck in the universe was taken by one man, and JD would've agreed. He cringed at her insinuating that, hurt to his core.

"I didn't believe in God before the Corps, and maybe I still don't now, but I have to believe that the only reason I'm alive is because someone upstairs has made it so I have to die for someone else. That's the only thing that makes sense to me." He was running out of breath, the rest of the rocks dropped back into the river as he grit his teeth. He sounded crazy to himself. "It's not luck that I'm alive. There's _**nothing lucky**_ about being alive after what I've been through."

Mai had kept her silence, her blank face, eyebrows still furrowed at herself as she backed up a bit only to find a dry spot she could sit on rock and dirt.

"You're awfully complex for a Marine." She stated flatly, but hopefully she saw the line she cast out for him. "I'm sorry I said that… I'm sorry for snapping at you."

He chuckled in return, turning over to look at her. "You're awfully interesting in general. I thought you New Jerusalem-types are all godly and preachy and stuff. So I hear."

He bit and was glad for it, turning back to conversation that they needed: one that hadn't been heavy with existential purpose.

"It's- ah." She stumbled as she had to return the conversation back. That's right. She did tell him that. That she was born on a colony in the Cygnus System. Her training had told her to leave the life she was born into behind, and to instead concentrate on the now: becoming a Spartan. For the most part, she did, and she did it well. She became one of the best of her clan. She became a Spartan and forgot that, once, long ago, she was a little girl. "I never got caught up in New Jerusalem's… inner politics."

JD nodded, a little thankfulness in the movement. New Jerusalem was one of those planets where Earthly issues had come with its colonists. It would've been part of the Insurgency if it hadn't already been a goat rodeo enough to not form a united front against the UEG. Ethnic, religious, societal, economic issues creating divisions in its society that hurt any who hadn't hardlined a particular viewpoint. Its chaos was perhaps a reason why the UEG, and then the UNSC, needed hands on in the colony.

"Caught in the middle?" He asked.

It wasn't like the interrogations by Cleft-Lip, Sunglasses, and Ryder for her biographical details. She would give them nothing, not when it was in the name of intelligence services or cases. With JD however, it was… different.

No one had ever talked to her like this, despite knowing she was a Spartan.

It was easy to talk to him.

Something was easy.

"I was just… poor. Me and my mother, we were getting tossed in between shelters. Too busy surviving to really weigh in."

Not many of the colonies were particularly well off, especially not one always in turmoil.

"Join the service to find a way out then?" JD had heard of that story so many times, even in the apocalyptic war. It wasn't the one that she was familiar with, far from it as she brought her knees up to her chest. She shrunk back down, back into the water, to sit. On bad nights, when her mind wandered in her sleep, during periods of cryo-sleep that didn't afford her complete mental shutdown from the world, she saw it.

She saw her mother get sedated in that dark alleyway by the men in black as she was led away into a van. She looked so beautiful, her dark hair flowing as she dropped to the dirty concrete next to a dumpster. It was her last sight of her as the ONI Agents did the same to her. When she came to she was already in slipspace, having left her city, her planet, for the first time, toward Onyx.

_"I was taken."_

"Huh?"

_ **"We were all taken."** _

These words alone would've ended humanity. If spoken, made public knowledge, they would've destroyed the UNSC, ONI, and any semblance of faith behind the Spartans against the Covenant. It was the dark secret of the Spartan program, born from acts of sin. If any citizen in the UEG knew this, let alone any of the colonists, riots would've broken out as the price of survival became too high.

JD replayed the last few seconds in his heads. His question to her, and her answer.

_Did you join because of this reason?_

_No. I was taken._

The Spartans were known all to be comrades, combat veterans of the war given special treatment in order to boost their capability. They were all, presumably, consenting adults who wanted nothing more but to bring the hurt to the Covenant. The truth was far worse.

"Do not think less of me."

JD interjected before she even spoke more. "I hardly know you Mai. I only know you as a Spartan. You basically kept us all alive, together." He went to throw another rock as he spoke, not believing she needed to hear this. He spoke of all the Spartans as he understood it: armored monsters of men and women who had given their all for humanity willingly, their sacrifices bringing survival.

"JD." She stressed. For some reason she reached out to him with one hand, he was turned, never seeing it as she pulled back. "Please, what I am about to tell you, think of what you will of the Spartans, but please do not think any less of me."

Why did she care? She thought. It was a question that passed by her mind unanswered.

He turned after hearing her plead, nodding his head, looking right at her. "Okay." Softly spoken, truly understanding.

ONI would've killed her for saying, and him for knowing. The Colonies would've risen up in rebellion again, even with the Covenant on their doorstep. Halsey, wherever she was, would have to answer to a question that the average salt of the earth person would not see her way. The Spartans were never meant to fight the Covenant. The Spartans were never meant to be reintegrated into society. The Spartans were never meant to die.

"We were kidnapped as children and made into who we are." JD stared at her blankly, eyes widening as the words came at him like death, finally come to collect. He mouthed words he could not say, trying to find a way to fully understand what she was saying.

'We?' He wasn't sure if he even said it, but she answered.

_ **"The Spartans. All of us. We're war orphans, children of bums and street rats, or, at worst, kidnapped from families outright from the outer colonies where no one would look."** _

It was a common idiom in the ODSTs to state that they, when dropped, were the desperate measures.

This, the revelation that would've rightly caused the outer colonies to wage war again against Earth, was truly desperate. His face saddened, unmeasurable sorrow and depth thrown bestowed upon him, as she saw this woman he had hardly known for a few days from another angle. He had been so careful himself to think of her not just as a Spartan. His father taught him that one lazy day at the station:

_"Behind every criminal is a person with hopes and dreams, Jay Jay." The elder Durante told his son. "I deal with humans every day, not titles and abstractions."_

"How old were you?"

No one had ever pitied her before. No one knew. No one was supposed to know. She did not need pity in her life, she was too strong for that, but distantly she thought better of JD. He wasn't giving her pity. He was giving her an outlet.

JD wasn't a great talker. Listening was more his forte.

"I was fourteen." That was old for the company. Only Carter had been an older Spartan-III.

She didn't even know her own age, cryosleep skewing the number. 27, 26, maybe 25. She didn't really know.

"That's-" JD couldn't say anything. He thought he had been a young Marine at 17, however that was- it was insane.

"It was mostly younger, for the Spartan-IIIs, and the Spartan-IIs."

IIIs and IIs. He heard her mention the classes back at Arcturus. He picked up the rocks again from the water, noting how different each was despite being formed in the same place.

"What's the difference between them? What were Spartan-Is?"

She looked back into her memory. "Spartan-Is were, I think, a prototype project. First attempts at military bio-augmentation. Unremarkable. Some ODSTs still alive today were members, I think, and don't see it as anything special." That thought was interesting to JD. He might've served with Spartans before then. Mai continued however, and the rabbit hole had gotten bigger. "the Spartan-II project was where the ones you hear about are from."

"The Chief… was a Spartan-II?" The ones all the UNSC knew. Changing the tide of battle with lethality and effectiveness only rivaled by fairytales and comic book heroes. Champions of the human race in battle.

She nodded. "Heavy bio-augmentation. Even with the Spartan-I project before it, half of the seventy strong class died."

It was a number he had been given: There had only been about forty Spartans in that galaxy from the class, a lot to take in as he realized that, against a galactic empire, forty Spartans did much. Forty men and women against billions. He realized something though. "You're not a Spartan-II though?"

Again she affirmed with a head nod. "Spartan-III. Mass production. Program which never existed. Bio augmentation rate was nearly 100% survivable compared to the IIs, but, because of that, not enough gear to properly equip us with… that wasn't the plan anyway."

"What was?"

"Suicide missions." How ironic that now, she wanted one. "Give us armor that was a step up from regular issue, send us deep behind enemy lines or toward heavily fortified locations of tactical value, and sacrifice us all for the sake of humanity."

Three hundred at a time. Three hundred young girls and boys pumped full of chemicals, given a mission for revenge, and told to die for their species. She would've been one of them gladly. Instead she was now the only proof they existed.

"But… you're still here. You wear that armor." JD kept trying to tie together the details, as to why she was who she was.

"Only because I was told that I was… the best. At least as good as the Spartan-IIs. Better even… maybe the best. I didn't deserve to die in a suicide mission… Special treatment comparable to the IIs." It hurt her so much to say. It had seemed so cowardly and egoistic of her to say that she was the best of the Spartans save one, however the data all backed it up, the analysis by those who had access to her after action reports, and that from all the Spartans.

For all his life JD had been told that the Spartan-IIs were all consenting adults who had known the war. To think of them the same as Mai…. A dangerous question. One that he had to ask.

"Do you know how old the Master Chief was?"

Humanity's savior, the Reclaimer, 117. She knew that answer. Not because Ambrose had specifically told her, but because it was a slip of tongue. Kurt once mentioned he had been the same age as John, but somehow, he had been more of a leader. She knew what age Kurt had been conscripted into the program.

What that meant that was John-117 had been-

_"Six. _ _ **He was six** _ _."_

That was the price humanity had to pay to fight a losing war. Kidnapping children, essentially babies, from their homes or taking advantage of them and forcing them to fight a war that was lost. For many, that was a price too great.

"Please. Don't say anything. Don't reassure me or- don't." She stood up in her stammering. She never even thought of what it would be like to say these things. To say it to anyone else? Impossible.

Spartan Time kicked in. A thousand variations of what type of person she imagined JD to be and then his responses played in her head. Empathy, pity, disgust all common themes. Maybe he would be glad that he left the UNSC behind then, cursing the ONI devils as they were. Maybe he would end up emotional for her, crying.

Every guess was wrong, not when he quickly said to her: "Do you regret anything?"

"No." A kneejerk reaction, as quick as she was on the trigger. No, she didn't regret a damn thing about what she had become.

JD clasped his wet hands, granules of dirt and stone on his skin as he then unclasped, opening them as if airing them out. "Okay then."

What?

Mai had looked at him confused.

There was a smile on his face as he went back to skipping rocks. No elaboration, no reasoning. Just he continued to do so, leaving her there on dry rocks, only for her to, after a minute of silence, her walking forward to join him.

"Here." He handed her over a few stones. "I never skipped rocks until I was deployed to Persei. No ponds on Luna."

She took his rocks without word, holding them in her palms and feeling how well rounded they were by nature. Perfect skipping stones. Every time he threw a rock he had been able to fight the current for a few skips, at max four, but always at least two. She could do better, she thought. That was until she did it overhand and ended up just dunking the stone.

Immediately JD saw what she did wrong, even if the stone had been fast and somewhat skimming the water.

"All about technique. Wrist action. Like a Frisbee." He demonstrated once simply.

"Frisbee?" She hadn't known the word.

"Ah uh, just copy me."

It took a few tosses to get acclimated to his form, but when she did, she was throwing them record distances. He didn't expect anything else as he hid a smile from her at the success of teaching her how to skip rocks. She was fully engrossed in it as she continued to without his prompting, giving him time to dry his hands in his pockets.

After a while, and he knew he couldn't have left their conversation at that, he returned to it.

"I don't judge, you know. Judging is for judges."

Internally she smirked. He was really showing off his "Dad was a cop" upbringings.

"I won't judge you for what you've been through, or for what you've done." He said calmly, not turning to her. "I mean, I think it's disgusting that people would ever think of that: kidnapping children to fight the Covenant."

She grumbled. "Wasn't for the Covenant."

"Huh?"

"The original Spartans were made to fight Insurrectionists."

Another pang in his moral soul, but he shook it off. He could deal with those thoughts alone without her. "Still. I can never judge. Not if you've made your peace with it, and not if you've saved lives none of us could."

Again, he was running out of breath. Maybe he needed to practice _talking_ more.

They looked at each other's faces now, past the avoiding, not needed now. They took each other in because they each deserved nothing less at that point.

Admiration was in his words. The first she could cleanly get from him. It was familiar, many a Marine or servicemember she had been in the presence of tried to deliver to her. She always blocked them out until today, until him.

How many Marines had been like him, she wondered, the urge to speak a language to him reserved only for Spartans coming over her and passing in one moment. No helmets on, no armor, no war. All that meant was that she wanted to say something because she felt something.

Nothing could be said however, not as JD turned away and spoke again.

"I told you that whole stuff, about me being alone, because you're around now." She tilted her head at him as he couldn't bare to look at her. "I don't need you going off on a suicide mission, or getting court martialed, and leaving me out alone. Even if I know you can go out there and deal with all of them. _**That's not what we do now**_. Not again."

She understood now. Nothing hidden. Nothing to hide. Marines were straight shooters and he was a good Marine. He knew orders, and he reminded her that she had orders to follow too. "Thank you, JD." Quiet, like the wind.

He skipped out another rock. Five skips this time. That was another victory today. "I say if we're starting our lives over, I figure I start fresh with you too. The mission was a coincidence, this I'd like to be intentional."

"Hm?"

"We don't have to be friends, I just want to know you as you are and to know I can talk to you. We're the only people who could understand what we've been through."

She looked at him. Really looked at him. Not to tactically analyze him. Not to see if he had been hurt. She looked at him to see him. He had faint frown lines, his face seemingly permanently placed into a somber look, the ends of his mouth too used to frown or tightening his jaw. He was an image of a young man, ready to die for his people, and he very much carried with him those that had already within him. How heavy had been the weight on his shoulders?

How heavy had been the one on her own? Numb to feeling after all those years.

She knew what had made her: training, a childhood in poverty.

What had made him however? What made him tick? What made him a man?

"I…" She had never formed this sentence before in her head or anything like it. "I think we'll be friends."

That was the first time she saw JD smile, and, unknowingly, that was the first time JD had seen a Spartan do the same.

That was how they spent the rest of their first day: skipping rocks till sunset.

* * *

They walked the streets of Buffalo alone at night. Nip in the air, Thanksgiving almost upon the American states. No cars however. Cars had become somewhat of an antiquated subject in terms of the commute, replaced by those that hovered and flew to places.

They emerged back into New Buffalo back toward their hotel long after the night came and they learned how to use their omni-tools as flashlights. The streets were very well lit, hiding nothing but the monsters in plain sight. That was how spooked the two of them were as, unknowingly, they had been approached from behind and regretted letting their guard down.

"Hi! Me and my girlfriend were just wondering where we could get some peace and quiet! Away from all this city-stuff. I mean it's great and all but I wanted to see some of Earth's best locales at night, and I heard the rivers that lead to that Niagara Falls are some great stuff!"

He looked like dinosaur and she looked like a blueberry, and, because of that, Mai had held a breath so deep in her lungs her fingernails had dug into her palms. Eyes wide, fighting so desperately against herself. There was no lie: she was a born and raised xenophobe. To the Turian with the Asari on his arm, she looked like as if she'd seen a ghost in them.

JD wasn't much better as his mouth went dry and he struggled for words as they appeared too close to the too fast. His hand floated near his hip, but there was no pistol. All of this just automatic response. He knew, so deeply, that no pistol was needed and this was normal. He screamed at himself: This was normal. The new normal. It didn't help that he had felt a hand almost crush his left arm painfully at the elbow. It was Mai, and right now he was her anchor. Without him she would've done something: an unknowable something that would've ended her new life before it began.

This JD felt, quite literally, in his bones, pressed to do something.

"Uh- Go- go that aways. You'll find a forest and a- a path. Can't miss it. On the shore of a river, it's nice. Quiet." He spoke unsure, his speech translated instantly through his omni. In the dark of night and barely illuminated by the street lamps it hid the sweat on his brow and the tightness in his throat. Perhaps it was well enough that the Turian and Asari were a few drinks in and wanting to bone privately in a public space that hid what JD and Mai would now remember as their first contact.

Before he felt relief, he felt pain from his arm.

Burning, like sandpaper on a paper-thin surface, her hand had dug into his skin as he very much tried to twist away. Hotness and pressure emanating from her grip as she drew a blank gaze and was lost to her mind. It was almost as if she was overheating. Not even a hit from a plasma rifle had hurt that much, and he had known what that was like as he felt the bones of her fingers and palm almost touch his own through their skin. The tightness of it robbing his breath as, in one final play he used his entire body, his free arm barring across her with a push. It took a lot for her to be pushed off and it stole his breath.

"Mai-! _**Mai!**_" His final loud yells had broken her out the trance before something had broken. She hadn't even given him a breath to settle before Mai had realized what she'd done as he held his arm painfully.

"I didn't mean to-!" She went to hold his arm again, but he had backed away, his other arm out with a hand that read stop, walking five steps back.

"What the hell is-?!" He asked a question he had answers to:

She was a genetically trained super soldier raised from nothing. All she knew was how to hurt people. She was a freak, unfit to live outside of war and a purpose.

_What the hell is your problem?_

It hurt like hell as he swear he felt his bone bend, his hand replacing where hers was as he tried to smoothen it out.

She stepped toward him again, wanting to help, but again he stepped back.

"I- I-." He tried to form words as he felt the adrenaline. Pain meant battle. Battle meant war. War meant he was there. He couldn't stop it as he felt the rage, the anger meant for combat be inadvertently directed at me. "I understand the Spartans a little better because of you, Mai." He spoke coldly, frost on his breath. "But because of that, I think you have to learn how to live again."

"I didn't mean to!" She had both tried to whisper and yell, desperation run ragged in her voice as again she stepped toward JD. Again he stepped back. "_**Wallah**_, I'm telling the truth _**Jon**_."

She heard her mother say that once, exasperated. She hadn't said that word in years. Not since the American English of the UNSC became her standard accent, her standard voice.

All JD heard was his name, his face softening. He was making her beg for understanding, forgiveness. She of all people didn't need to beg for that.

"Please. _**Help me. I don't want to do that again. I don't know- I don't know why- how-.**_" Words sputtered out, away, illogical, emotional. The most emotion he had heard from her. Human emotion. Not that of being a soldier with anger and ferocity.

Lone Wolf. That's what they called her. Ackerson's personal Grim Reaper. B312. Spartan. The Master Chief's equal. Hyper Lethal Vector. Noble Six. Majestic One. Headhunter. God's very own anti-son of a bitch machine. Ideas, concepts, abstractions that all had to be lived up to, fulfilled, but at the end, eating away at the person beneath.

She was the result of what happened when ONI, the Spartan Program, had eaten someone alive and spit out what remained. Her hands shook, her very bones feeling more brittle then they had ever been as she felt her knees go weak and a shake in her voice.

A realization for both of them: she was never supposed to live.

She didn't know how she'd die. Whether by Elite, or Insurrectionists, or herself. All that she knew in that moment was that she was a Roman Candle and never meant to last. For if she survived she would in the end have to fight the one enemy that she had been trained to forget her entire life: Herself.

This wasn't who she had wanted to be. This wasn't who her mother wanted her to become. Her knees hit the stone ground of the street, and out from her shirt had been a necklace. JD remembered it now even in the worst of lighting in the worst of times:

It was a dharmachakra. The wheel of Dharma.

Life. Death. Rebirth. Liberation upon liberation. A Noble Eightfold Path followed by those who practiced.

In this life Mai Gul, daughter of a vagrant, was reborn into a killing machine for the sake of humanity and the irony was burned onto a wooden wheel that had been the only thing left of who she once was.

She was only human. JD let the pain in his arm fade as the guilt replaced it for backing away from her. She was only human.

It was a fact that he had been so hard trying to imagine her as, to see her as. It was revealed to him then and there that, perhaps, perception was not enough as he had slowly walked back to her. _**"I will."**_

Nothing more he had to say. Nothing more he could say. His words were a promise without saying. They were people of actions, not words. Of the near sob taken back and the tears held back; of the hand offered and the hand that came up to, this time softly, take it and use it to raise herself up.

She wanted help, and he gave it. He was only human.

* * *

Two weeks. That's all that they had to discover, on their own, the measure of this universe and everything that they had to take as simple, basic fact.

If they were anything to judge, they had done well for themselves as they stood in their newly minted Alliance uniforms and awaited pick up with a shuttle, each with a ruck sack over their shoulders. A formality really. They owned nothing but whatever creature comforts JD had, at the last minute, splurged on, along with the bare minimum of clothing.

"Tell me a little about yourself, Jonathon-Jameson Durante." Mai had repeated for the hundredth time in the last twenty-four hours, they standing rigid next to each other, but comfortable. It was an exercise in cover story.

"Born in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, before moving to New York City when I was kid. My father was a detective in Queens, however before I became of age both my parents died because a Turian stabbed them in a home invasion. I joined the Systems Alliance Navy with no other realistic recourse after that." It was an odd choice, to integrate a reason for their xenophobia, but it was a needed buffer. An excuse, a reason for an uncomfortableness that no wiki article could break away in their days and days of studying. Whatever the case it was a designed cover story from the Admiralty's staff. "There I proved myself an able Search and Rescue operator, deployed on many classified mission taskings in the Terminus and Attican Traverse."

"You in the N Program?" Mai continued.

"Classified ma'am." She still thought it odd that he addressed her so formally at times, even with their equal ranks, but she still aired of superiority to him and he could only respond as he should.

_"You don't have to, you know."_

_"One step at a time." _He said one sleepless night as they toiled over early human spaceflight history.

"And, you, Chief Gul, what's your story?"

It wasn't the first time she had assumed a new life. This was the only time it had made her a human however. Details rehearsed like mission information and intel, gone through her mind a million times:

She sucked in a breath before beginning. Hadn't faced him, talking shoulder to shoulder, looking out at the cloudy sky. "Mai Gul. I'm 26 years old, and I was born in transit on a cargo vessel also carrying chartered colonists. Parents put me up for adoption and I was bounced from home to halfway home until I joined the Systems Alliance Navy and, given my natural ability, to a special warfare division. Dealt with a lot of… aliens. Developed certain opinions on them."

"Are we acquainted?"

"By coincidence. We served in different units, but always ended up in related ops. I know everything which you just reiterated, Chief Durante."

A crack of a smirk, a smile, on the ODST's face. "JD is fine, Mai." Jon or James wasn't yet, apparently.

She had been to a dentist in that two weeks, getting her tooth replaced finally, and then, discretely, to a walk-in esthetician. The scars around her skin were covered up as best they could, and no question was asked. She looked a little more normal, but she only bothered for the sake of looking normal to the crew.

They were to return to the Normandy, Anderson's ship, via a shuttle inbound from the West Coast and then up to an Alliance space dock in Earth orbit, probably with other crew.

In the time they had waited for this, that being the two weeks before hand, they had answered questions sent their way from Anderson and Hackett's office in terms of gear and their needs, along with other questions to help their transition. Being near an Alliance outpost had helped as they tried to point out any discrepancies between the UNSC and the Alliance forces, but, surprisingly, enough was the same, and they had enough time on the range to know what the Mass Effect based weaponry was like.

Element Zero was something had could barely understand, but, alone, they knew it was something they never had. One of the only things that was new.

The stars were still the same, roughly. A few new faces among them, something they had to account to, but they were confident. They had to be.

For the life they left behind, either it be a curse or a blessing, and for themselves. They'd been to war, they were veterans, and, hopefully, they were strong enough to take on that galaxy.

A blue Kodiak had wandered into view past the clouds, quickly coming down as they stood rigid, together, only turning their heads away as the hovering shuttle kicked up dirt and debris before landing entirely, it's shuttle door open and revealing a woman clad in a uniform that displayed a solid rank.

That rank mattered to them as they both saluted her. With one dip of her head she acknowledged them with her own salute. "At ease. Report?" A deeper voice for a woman, confident and strong, but still feminine.

"Master Chief Petty Officer Durante, at your service Lieutenant Commander."

"Master Chief Petty Officer Gul, ma'am."

She rose an eyebrow. "Two Master Chiefs with us on this cruise? That's an odd combination."

"Our orders ma'am." JD spoke, eyes straight still.

She had chuckled, blowing air through her nose. "Ah, I'm not complaining Chief." JD had a twinge at her calling him that, but he had hid it as the red haired woman held out her hand. "Lieutenant Commander Shepard. Glad to meet you."

_ **Lieutenant Commander Jane Shepard** _

_ **A Reaper in the Flesh** _

_ **Reclaimer** _

The first handshake was regulation, a formality. Firm, two pumps, drawn away. The second handshake had been hard, tight, surprising, and yet soft.

There was another object, asides from the bear pelt, that the two had their eyes drawn to as she moved away from her seat in the shuttle, touching the concrete so she could converse with them. Out in the light another object across her back was seen. For JD and Mai, it had been the oddity in seeing a firearm as they knew it: with gun powder and brass as opposed to electronics and Mass Effect fields.

She noticed as she let it sling off her back, proudly displaying it in her hands. "It's a heavy barreled .458 on a Mauser action. Scope's even 20th century original."

It was a wooden rifle. Mai had only seen these types with the more desperate Insurgents.

"Not standard issue, ma'am." She spoke.

Shepard had nodded, aware of it very much so. "Never know when this will come in handy," she had taken it off her back, rolling the action, making sure there was actually no rounds in it. "Besides, if there's ever an insane situation where I do have to use this, it's basically a pea shooter with the barriers and shields in play… Now come on, don't want to keep the Captain waiting, do we?"

She seemed friendly. Personable. Her entire form though, it spoke of someone who knew what she was doing, even for a Systems Alliance personnel compared to them.

They felt good in her presence. That was as good as anything when being introduced to their new XO. It was what every soldier desired at some point.

"No ma'am."

Every great journey began with a single step, the two remembered from the Prophet's words. When the Lieutenant Commander stepped aboard that Kodiak, they, for once, knew what the Covenant had been talking about.

The Great Journey they would embark on wouldn't be the one they were destined for, but it was the one they were in. Their lives had been reframed, and their duties reoriented, but no matter what they remained who they were: soldiers of humanity, no matter what kind. The path they had taken was now one shared this Shepard.


	7. 1-1: Shepard

* * *

** _The Beginning of Mass Effect 1_ **

* * *

"I didn't leave Earth until I was eighteen."

Those were words that JD had heard before. Words that he could say himself, albeit replacing it with the object they had been looking at through the window provided by that model of Kodiak. They came from a woman, pale skinned, red hair that had almost been as dark and deep as the one on the animal skin she had, somehow, folded neatly besides her. Freckles had painted her face warmly, her lips full, and, surprisingly, a hint of some lipstick on it. Indeed, her vibrant green eyes were sunken and just so tastefully highlighted by some light touch up, circles on face, laugh lines shaping her mouth.

She wore her casual BDU, sleeves rolled up, exposing muscled arms that would be impressive, if not for the fact Mai had immediately beat her in that regard.

"I thought it was just a cliché," she began, her head rested on her hand, arm leaning on her ruck. "But I didn't realize how tiny I was until I left Earth."

There was wonder in her air, fiery, and sincere. "Every time I leave Earth I just get this chill."

She spoke like a rookie ODST, JD felt, and yet…

They had been alerted to her name just recently and cursory Extranet searched had revealed someone very remarkable. The type of person who would very much use a rifle nearly two centuries out of date and lug a rug made out of a bear she had personally hunted to her new posting.

It felt rude to look up, but she had a public record, definitely. One they could both respect.

How she stayed so chipper despite what she had done was… rare.

The moon stared back at them as the shuttle rose into space. Mai privately thought of JD and how it was a shame that he hadn't tried to even visit the moon, his home, again. She had hinted toward him, one lazy breakfast in their hotel room, PBJ sandwiches being made for what felt like the twentieth time, that he should've made travel arrangements before they were deployed.

He answered with something he had held as much true now in this universe as he did in his home. _"There's nothing left for me there."_

"It was my first time on Earth, ma'am." Mai commented. Smalltalk. He had seen JD grace through the smallest of talk when they visited that diner again, speaking no more than single words a time in between dozens with other patrons. She tried to emulate. She would have to become used to it.

Shepard turned her head toward Mai, her form much too tight, too straight, for her to be comfortable at all. "I thought I told you to be at ease, Chief Gul." She tried to slack her shoulders, but nothing would do it as Shepard simply smirked at her attempts. The Lieutenant Commander knew the sort from her time in Special Forces: men and women wound too tight that they would never stretch, even when ordered. She wouldn't give Mai a hard time however, not with a shake of her head. "How'd you like Earth? Where you been?"

"New Buffalo ma'a-" She caught herself halfway. "Shepard." She had instead replaced on the fly. Even that had made her internally cringe. It didn't feel right.

"Oh? By the Falls, right?"

JD nodded, sparing Mai the awkwardness. "Yeah. Had to stay around the city though."

"Shame. So much to do on Earth you know."

"Maybe next time, then?" Mai whispered more to herself than Shepard. She noticed however.

"Well, what suits your fancy?"

"Pardon?"

Shepard had looked out the window again, wistfully, but adventurously. "Travelling down the Rio Grande, hiking in Appalachia, sledding in the Yukon, surfing on the dunes of Arabia… come on, any of that sound exciting to you? I'm personally a fan of blue ways."

She was an outdoorsman by heart and soul, that much JD could tell, and it was a questioned posed by her new XO that Mai had to contend with as she sat back and, looking down at her boots for but a moment, answered: "Farms." Shepard tilted her head, but not in judgement, just thinking of her own experiences to see if she could understand. "I like farms."

Shepard nodded in agreement. "Ah yes, I remember when I was in Tuscany as a kid, the wheat fields were about the most beautiful thing I've seen in the boot."

"Grew up in Tuscany?" JD posed.

A few shakes of her head. "I got around when I was a kid. Hitchhiker. Started when I was 13 in San Francisco. By the time I enlisted at 18 I lived and breathed that old creed… You know what I'm talking about, right?"

JD was a Marine. Not a Frog.

Mai did however. Whereas she had been a Spartan assigned to the UNSC Army, the Spartan-IIs had been assigned to the Navy's special warfare group. She was familiar with, hopefully, something that only the most traditional of special forces in the UNSC Navy had held onto:

She began to speak, like a machine warming up, but finding her stance as all Shepard could do was smile at her warmly:

_Been around the world twice, talked to everybody once._

_Seen two whales fuck, been to three world fairs, and I even know a man in Thailand with a wooden cock._

_I push more peter, more sweeter, and more completer, than any other peter pusher around._

_I'm a hard bodied hairy chested, ruttin' tuttin' shootin' parachutin' demolition double cap krimpin' Frogman._

_There aint nothing I can't do, No sky too high, No sea too rough, No muff too tough._

_Learned a lot of lessons in my life._

_Never shoot a large caliber man with a small caliber bullet._

_I drive all kinds of trucks, two by, four by, six by, and those big motherfuckers that bend and go "CHHH CHHH" when you step on the brakes._

_Anything in life worth doing is worth overdoing, moderation is for cowards._

_I'm a lover, I'm a survivor, I'm a Navy Special Forces fighter._

_I'll wine dine, intertwine. Then sneak out the back when the re-fueling is done._

_So if you're feeling froggy then you better jump. because this Frogman has been there, done that, and is going back for more."_

It was a recitement of her life up to her enlistment, so Jane Shepard felt at ease among the Navy and the SOF. "I'm glad you know that Chief Gul. Must mean you've earned how much black ink is in your bio."

Mai had stirred uncomfortably. It was the same thing, time after time, officers she had been assigned to remised to have her file: only to see that there was nothing there they could read. They all would ask questions she could not answer. Shepard would be different however:

"Mai? Am I saying that correctly?" She said it like the month. Most people did.

"Mai." She responded back. Like 'my'. She didn't even remember why she had known that was the correct way to say it, but it was what she felt right.

The commander nodded. "Mai." She repeated. "Heh. Just looking at you, I can imagine you know your way around a deployment… and, of course, you too, Chief Durante."

The two had felt comfortable in her presence. As if they had known her all their lives. That was how casual Shepard felt, how open she was. JD couldn't help but shake his head in good jest. "I suppose my file isn't much better?"

Shepard affirmed with one head nod. "I've got a feeling you're my new one and two for away missions."

JD pursed his lips once before shrugging. "Could be. Our orders are from Anderson, and if we're your naval liaisons on the ground, so be it."

With that, Shepard couldn't be anymore pleased, or, at least, she seemed to be. "I trust the Captain's judgement. He's done more for the Alliance than I ever could, and if you two are Master Chiefs, well, I have no reason to doubt his judgement or you." Her gaze drew onto Mai's hands, balled into each other:

She had held her hands together, fingers rubbing over her own knuckles. They were calloused, and worn, scabbed over and worn down to the bone, again and again. Mai noticed, unconsciously running her own thumbs over her own soft hands. "Now Captain Anderson forwarded me bios on most of my crew, however I'd rather hear it from the horse's mouth."

This, vaguely, was what they were training for.

"We're not awfully interesting people." Mai had admitted. It was a lie, but Shepard seemed very forward. She leaned in from her own seat gently, slowly, eyes locked with both of them at a time.

"Well, I just like to get to know who I'm serving with. In the long run, I think it helps. Unit cohesion and all that… unless of course, you want to wait for those first cringy ice breakers in the mess of the Normandy."

JD had sat through enough of those in his life, and it writ on his face.

"Tell me a little about your self Chief Durante… Is Jonathon okay?"

He breathed out, rubbing the back of his head before relenting. "JD is fine ma'am, or Chief Durante."

"Okay. Where you from JD?"

He came, both in a lie, and by his heritage, from almost-heaven. "West Virginia."

"Ah. I'm a California girl myself… You an outdoorsman too?"

"Eh. I don't mind a hike."

"Fair enough. And you Mai? Where you from?"

She straightened her back. She was not used to lying. "Don't know ma'am. Was born on a chartered freighter and left at an orphanage. My early years are a blur, truthfully."

Her first memories as a Spartan trainee had been her first memories of her coherent mind: the time with her mother on New Jerusalem having degraded with age and war. She damned it, but it was the reality of her life. She remembered being strapped with a backpack and told where to pull when the time was right, she remembered the dark of a planet unknown below her with dozens of other different children and young teenagers like her. Most of all she remembered being pushed out the back of the Pelican and told to rendezvous (as if she knew what that word meant at the time) at a set coordinates or else face death.

Shepard's face has softened. "You seemed to turn out well for yourself however."

"Thank you ma'am." Mai spoke dryly.

JD had told her the same, days ago. She really had.

Mai didn't know whether or not she would appreciate the praise, the compliments. She was still processing it in her head. She was a person who lived without thanks, and the sudden change now, she didn't know if it had been truthful or not.

"What brought you into the fold?" The service she meant.

Mai didn't even have a choice, but she had rehearsed her answer in her head for a few nights now: "I saw little else I could do with my life."

"And, well," Everyday the news would come in on Luna of more and more colonies falling, the death toll rising and rising. Maybe it was a little selfish of him, but JD had never wanted to fight the Covenant on his home turf, it would've broken his heart so. So he took to the stars as a Marine and never looked back. "I just felt it was the right thing to do with my life."

"You two were flagged for xenophobic tendencies." Shepard had outright said, JD and Mai immediately feeling their spine tighten and straighten. "Mind if I ask why? I don't get that often, and with who, it makes sense… you two however, I don't think you're the type."

Mai had an answer before JD could even politely respond. "I've fought aliens all my life, ma'am. I'm hardwired, unfortunately."

"I'm- I guess. I try not to be but I'm the same way." JD relented. He didn't believe what he was saying, but it was what he was.

They watched videos on the extranet, documentaries detailing different alien species, how they were, are, warnings for humans if they were tourist on their world, however it wasn't enough.

"Elysium? Torfan? There during the Blitz?"

Mai had been right there with opsec. "We are not currently disposed to talk about any operations on those worlds, if indeed they did happen."

"Spec ops?" Shepard had gleamed.

The silence was their answer.

"I have a feeling you would've met us there."

She was there, of course, as JD pointed out.

As Shepard had been everywhere on Earth, she had been everywhere in her early years in service. "Ah, so you know me?" She said with a raised eyebrow and an amused smirk. "What do you know?"

"Lieutenant in 2176, on shore leave on Elysium when a combined force of Mercenaries and Pirates backed by the Batarians launched a siege of the colony. With little in the way of military or militia assets Elysium would not have survived the attack… that is if you weren't there to intervene and organize a defense." JD had read her file the most. Mai hadn't been too interested in who commanded her, as long as she had been commanded, it was no matter.

Shepard's confident gaze softened, looking to the floor reflectively. It was her first real combat as a Marine, in over her head with the fate of a colony on her shoulders. "I didn't know what else to do but to lead. Everyone was trying to save their own skin, and not each other. If we fell apart, people would've died."

To hold ground to him, as a Marine in the war against the Covenant, it was a death wish, but yet the most noble thing one could do. He continued to recite her story. "After rallying the defense and fending off the raiders, you were put on a Marine task force that put you on as QRF for colonists and colonies up and down the outskirts of Alliance space. One of your missions took you to Akuze."

Shepard looked up at him, a raised eyebrow. "That's not public info."

It was true. JD had asked Anderson for details more about Shepard. He licked his lips, waiting a second, clasping his hands and giving her time to come to terms with the fact that he was still going to speak:

"Sole survivor. Thresher Maw. I'm sorry." He made it painless. "And after that, to Torfan."

Loss after loss, defeat after defeat. Shepard clasped her own hands. "You know, sometimes, when I'm on civilian stations in transit, people will come up to me. To thank me for my service, for an autograph, advice, help, whatever… Just doesn't feel right."

It was a sadness that was familiar to JD. To survive when others didn't. She had survived nearly 120 of her soldiers, and, in the end, despite how many Batarians or Mercenaries she piled up in retribution, her losses carried with her.

Perhaps she lived as hard as she did for them, JD thought.

How odd it was, Mai had known of Shepard, for her to carry a title. Butcher of Torfan.

It was something she was used to having herself.

The cold sweeped over Shepard once, a memory she lived every day, her failures forgotten by the populace in lieu of her successes. It went away in a rumble of the shuttle. Docking. The rumble felt like the explosives used by the Batarians to smash her advance with her men. They always aimed high, hitting the men behind her, always, always missing her. War was the same for any species, especially in practice, and Shepard was no stranger to War and what it had done to souls.

JD and Mai would be thankful that Shepard did know what, but they would mourn for her because of it all the same.

Earth Space Dock where the Normandy was hosted for the last two weeks, they had just entered one of its shuttle hangers.

She stood, slinging her rifle over one shoulder and her bag around the other. "Have you been taking steps to deal with your xenophobic tendencies?"

JD nodded intensely, but Mai was unmoving. "I have," he said. "I really don't want to be but sometimes… it just-."

"I know." Shepard said, the doors of the shuttle opening. "I don't blame you, with the lives we tend to live, but **_we can do better_**." There was a strive in her voice, a desire.

Mai had stood, her own ruck slung as if it had weighed nothing. "Yes ma'am."

"Good, now one of you on each arm. I want to feel special."

They each knew the steps: of knowing where they were going. A new ship was on their horizon as they stepped off that dock and into the filtered air of the station, dozens of shuttles, military and civilian, coming in and out from what had also doubled as a port of commerce. First time around JD and Mai had hardly the time to look around, however now they were given the view of a clean station that handled itself well in natural orbit around Earth.

Again, the blue light of Earth had painted itself over the three of them as they stepped out, the hanger door leading out to space breathing in that light.

Mai still looked as unnatural, yet graceful, in it as she did the first time JD noted.

They had naturally formed into a three-man formation out, Shepard at the lead, the two of them just behind to her left and right. Several military personnel took note of Shepard and rendered salute, she giving her own down as the shuttle, upon their disembarking, took back off toward another duty today.

When Shepard walked, so did they, carrying them through the hallways and corridors of the station toward the larger military docking stations.

"Last time for some fast food, want any?" They passed by one of the food courts on the way, Shepard thumbing at it as they slowed their stride.

Mai, hit with a brick wall of fried food and oils in her nose, might've been tempted to say yes. In the end however it was just a distraction, so she shook her head along with JD.

"You guys are no fun." Shepard snickered. "Didn't have enough Happy Meals growing up?"

JD made a mental note that McDonalds still existed then. Somehow, in the rush of things, details like that kept him grounded to it all. And he, of all people, would know what it meant to be grounded.

* * *

She was still there, right where Anderson had left her

Named after the beaches of a continent, Mai had only known that name from studying combat tactics from a war long ago that took place on those beaches. JD, vaguely, remembered in his youth having played a few videogames which depicted the Battle of Normandy.

To them, that battle had been half a millennium- half of a thousand years- before their time. To Shepard it would've been only a century and a half or so. Still what it meant and why that name was given to this ship was understood all the same. The righteous, carrying justice, going off on the shores to save, to be victorious, against the evils that may be. That was what was imbued in this ship as they approached its HAZMAT and decontamination station in its nose from a ramp. Crew around them, also prepping to board, had been conversing and saying their goodbyes to their families. It was like any other deployment. Quiet, organized, emotional.

It was different though. Mai felt it on her finger tips, and JD felt it in the aura of the place. It felt so much different to be at peace than it had been to be at war. Every time a ship left docks carrying service members, there was always a feeling that the ship would be their tombs. That was how the war was going.

Here there was hopefulness.

To go off on a starship, it wasn't a death sentence. It was an **opportunity**.

Shepard hadn't flared her omni-tool to open the crew entrance initially. She instead reached out her hand, touching the steel hull, holding her palm against that cold steel.

"They tell me," her eyes had been closed, her only attachment to reality then was the feel of that cold in her hands and the low vibrato of the station around them. "They tell me this ship will go far. Go places where even the Council doesn't go. It'll be nice for humanity to lead the way for once."

Who was out there in that galaxy? It was the same question she shared with JD and Mai, unknowingly. What were they doing? How were they living? Did they need someone to save them from their sins? From themselves? Would they let her help them?

"A lot of pressure, ma'am." JD spoke quietly, looking back, hoping no one else had been coming. It looked like ritual what Shepard was doing so he had made no comment.

"It's what I want though."

Mai had known pressure. The weight of the human race had been on her shoulders once, and she did it with no thanks, with all the cruelty it meant that only now she had seen reflected from JD's gaze in the time they had known each other.

"Why?" The Spartan asked. She would've chosen her life again, without complaint, but now a piece of her born now had thought that was only because she was conditioned into being a willing machine. She wanted to know what it really was.

Shepard gave her answer, turning around, looking Mai dead in her eyes, firm, yet soft. Knowing, yet understanding. Her eyes had been that of a woman who had lived a good life. "After Akusze and Torfan, I did some soul searching."

Mai tilted her head, almost like a dog, eyebrow raised. "What did you find?"

Shepard twitched the corner of her mouth, unsure. "I don't know… but a Mongolian man said this to me one day when I spent a summer tending horses in East Asia: Sometimes people need to save, in order to be saved."

There was wistfulness in Shepard's voice, goodness and darkness all the same. JD could've counted, on his two hands, how many men and women he had known as an ODST that joined the service to do that: to save. A war gone on for thirty years and a lot of hate was made, bleeding through the society until it took heart. Good men and women were not supposed to go to war, were not made in war: the best of humanity was the ones that were supposed to be saved.

She was an N7, like Ryder.

It meant that she was one of the best humanity could offer they both remembered.

This was what that goodness looked like.

This was the type of humanity they were denied because of the Covenant.

Shepard's omnitool flashed and the door opened upwards, revealing decontamination, the trio stepping in finally with the SR-1 on the door looking at them like a face. The electronic voices went through its processes, keeping them informed on the clean they were going through as the air became heavier for a moment, but then lifted.

This was it: the rest of their lives in front of them, phasing through them like the laser scanner wall that went through them in its blue light.

_"Decontamination Sequence Already Completed."_

Still in that triangle formation, JD reached out, bumping Mai's free wrist discretely.

Ritual. What they shared between them. It was something. Odd, and yet something all the same. Something that was shared between them not because they came from a different reality, a different universe, but something that was shared between them because JD was JD, and Mai was Mai, and they were gradually, very gradually, stepping into being acquaintances.

Discretely, they pumped their free hands three times.

Paper beat rock. JD won that time.

JD would give himself a victorious smirk every time he won and she would be on point to go through a door. Mai wouldn't do much of anything.

She did take pride in her victories however, Shepard leading the way through to their new postings.

"Officer on deck!" Cried out one of the crew men. All those in eyesight had snapped up straight to attention.

The Normandy was an odd ship to JD and Mai: Frigate according to the Systems Alliance, but, to Mai, it was more like an ONI Stealth Sloop. It was the first ship of her class, with more on the way, a new type of ship built as a sign of cooperation between the Humans and the Turians. The Turians were more than happy to receive new medical equipment from the humans in exchange for further cooperation on the project.

Mai knew this type of resonance. Her shields, her active camo, they were all reverse engineered from the Covenant Elites. To think of aliens giving up whatever designs that led to the Normandy was a thought process she would have to become comfortable with.

Shepard looked proudly, to her left: the cockpit without a pilot currently, to her right, a command deck past comm, navigation, and sub-system consoles. A full complement. Men and women ready to set sail into the stars. A view of the galaxy in all of its holographic glory was displayed in the middle of that deck, surrounded by more consoles and crew.

Some had recognized who their new XO had come with, but said nothing about it. There was danger in knowing sometimes, and any who had been assigned to that ship had known a thing or two of secrets imbued within the military.

In an hour or so, the first "official" shakedown run of the Normandy was to take place. Though it was a lie. Altis had come up instead of the Normandy being delivered to Earth via the Kilimanjaro.

"At ease. Return to your duties." Shepard nodded down once. "Alert Captain Anderson I'm onboard."

"Yes ma'am." A voice rang out from those substations.

The thrill, the unease, the tension of stepping aboard a new ship had been dulled to both JD and Mai. To JD: every single ship he had been deployed on, no matter how big or well-armed, had been destroyed. Thankfully his drop pod had doubled as an escape pod in a cinch.

To Mai, it was different: she never found a home on a ship as did most UNSC servicemembers. Ships were merely transportations or hubs from which she was deployed out behind the frontlines. She could hardly remember their names, let alone what they had actually been.

Shepard however, she had breathed in that filtered air as if it had been air from Eden itself. It rejuvenated her, her eyes bright, a smile on her face. She loved it very much: both the ship, and her life. Within reason of course, she did not block out the pain of her past, but she beamed of rising from it.

Her elbows had each nudged into the two soldiers on each side. "If this ship is like any I've been on of this size, your lockers should be in the bay. I'll talk with you later chiefs."

* * *

They both had their own ways of removing themselves from a conversation curtly: with Chief Gul, it had been a nod with a stone, too serious face. With Chief Durante, it had been flash of a smile before his own face returned, sunken deep with thought. Though in the end, they went off together, immediately walking step in step with each other.

Those two had been familiar with each other, friends perhaps. That's how much Shepard could surmise of them as a pair. Individually however, they were interesting: held back and reserved. They were veterans, faded scars and mannerisms, where they looked when moving, it all told the tale of people she had learned from, and then eventually, became herself. They weren't Ns however, she would've been alerted to that when she had received the crew manifest.

Still, it was odd, seeing JD dive into conversation when Mai was taken aback, or, perhaps, paused. He was covering for her… compensating?

When free time came up, she'd inquire more. She was honestly interested in them as people.

A few of the crew had stared at Shepard a bit longer than she had liked, but there was, of course, the fact she had lugged a rifle and a bear pelt on top of her own ruck. It was no bother to her however as she stepped into the empty cockpit, stations around her buzzing, but non-threatening in their idle. The stars above Earth were seen, the Normandy still attached to the space dock. She looked out at them, through the viewing ports allotted to the pilot. Piloting in this day of age didn't rely on sightlines. It was all digital, through screens and visualizers, however a window was always nice when it came down to it.

The dossier on Flight Lieutenant Jeff Moreau had noted him to be a man who would prefer windows, if anything. He was eccentric enough to have stolen the Normandy during its first test flight and prove himself able to fly a ship of this caliber. She could appreciate that drive.

She never learned how to pilot, either a shuttle or a fighter. She was offered once, as a younger woman, during her time as a wanderer, to fly an old model, propeller driven aircraft she was riding during a hitchhiking session of hers over Old Russia. She declined, and always thought of it. She always thought of her missed opportunities, tracing her fingers over the headrest of the pilot's seat.

"Commander Shepard." A voice of a man behind her. She turned.

"Yes?"

Well built, sideburns a touch too long for her preference, but his hair neatly fluffed. He looked tired, squaring his back before looking at her. "Captain Anderson is waiting for you in his quarters, just behind the CIC are stairs that will take you down there."

"Thank you." She said first. "Your name sailor?"

"It's Marine, ma'am. And Staff Lieutenant Kaiden Alenko. Honored to serve with Lieutenant Commander Shepard."

He offered his hand, and she took it, shaking once. "Ah, so you're the one who reports ground team hijinks to me?"

Alenko rolled his head left once, straightening his mouth. "Hopefully none to be said. Not many Marines on this boat compared to other ships this size."

"What's the complement?" She knew how many, she just wanted to know if he did.

"According the Captain, sixteen Marines, me and you included. Some pull double duty with other shipboard activities."

Mai looked around Alenko to see if Mai and JD had still been in view. They weren't. "Are Chief Gul and Chief Durante included?"

Alenko sucked in his jaw, Shepard very much noticing as he too looked back to see if they were there. "Anderson briefed me on who they are actually." Shepard had heard that line before. If you had to be briefed on a people who would normally be beneath your jurisdiction, there was always a catch. Usually it had been VIPs with political connotations, people with codenames rather than actual names.

"What'd he say?"

"They are "Special Forces Liaisons from the Navy"."

Shepard tilted her head. "Really? If there would be any special forces contacts here, it would've been me or Captain Anderson himself."

Alenko agreed with a nod. "Yeah, that's what I thought." He and Chakwas. They were the only ones that knew that one had been more than human, and the other a soldier from a different war. That's not what they were told of course, but what they had guessed. Mercenaries perhaps, deep in the Terminus that dredged up the Covenant, or the blackest of Alliance Black Ops that had no record and only kept alive in word and word alone. Naturally any speculation was forbidden, and that their true nature, as told to them, was top secret. What Anderson said to Alenko was then the truth for all purposes. "They specialize in covert operations, search and rescue, behind enemy lines."

"Hmph. I see." Shepard took in these new facts rather well. To know that she had more special forces onboard was always a treat, tactically. She knew how hard and cold the type could get however. She was once faced with that road down into alcoholism, edgy outlooks, and general cynicism that made people hate life. She refused. "If I can call you Kaiden, will you call me just Shepard?"

Kaiden could only smile at that. "Of course, Shepard."

Lugging her bag, more comfortable around one shoulder again, she smiled back before moving. "I should go, Captain's waiting for me."

* * *

"Lieutenant Commander Shepard in the flesh." Captain Anderson had been more than happy to see one of humanity's best, rising from his desk in his quarters. His humanity, that is. He of all people had been reminded recently who the best had been, and where they had come from. Her pack had dropped to the floor when the doors closed behind her, not out of clumsiness, it was out of respect. A salute given and her face straightening to regulation blank. "At ease."

Her feet spread, one hand behind her back, the other held on the sling of her hunting rifle. "Permission to speak, Captain?"

"Granted."

She reached down to the floor, to the bear pelt, folding it over her arm. It was large but she had been able to drape it well, rolling it out to its full area. It was a rather sizable display, enough to fit comfortably in a mess hall as a distinct conversation piece. "Am I allowed to offer this as a gift to you and the Normandy?"

Anderson had been impressed, folding his arms, one hand to his chin as he observed the pelt.

It wasn't perfect. It couldn't have been, not with how many stab marks and bullet holes Shepard had put through it, but it added character. It was a testament to her ability. "Caught this yourself, Commander?"

She tilted her head side to side, thinking to herself. "If you were there, you'd be tempted to say it caught me, but I'm 100% condition green sir, and I have something to offer for it."

Anderson rose an eyebrow at the had-been hunter. "It would be very easy for me to call you out for doing something as so out of regulation as… this, you know. One might think this a tad childish? Offering something so… dramatic as this."

"Are you not satisfied sir? Alliance regulation makes no specific reference toward crew members decorating one's own ship outside of duty and service stations, such as the mess hall or sleeper pod areas." She said, resuming her regulation voice, squaring her back again.

Anderson softened his gaze. "Oh no. I'm just posing the question Shepard. I think the crew would enjoy something like this. I'll see to it that it finds a place itself. Thank you."

"May I offer this rifle too? So as to avoid processing of a personal weapon into the ship's armory? I have no intent to use this, given how outdated it is."

Anderson smirked. If this was any other XO he would've grilled them, but then again Shepard was special. Who was he to say anything about an officer that wanted to provide something as small as décor for their ship?

"We'll see. But for now, attention." He said casually, and she squared her feet again. "Welcome aboard Commander. Have you been briefed on the ship?"

"Yes sir."

"On the crew?" She hesitated for a moment, but relented.

"Yes sir."

"Your duty rosters and duties yourself?"

"Yes sir."

"And the nature of this shakedown run?"

"No sir."

That was the discrepancy she thought odd. Everything about her deployment orders had seemed as per usual, even if it had been on the Normandy, however no information regarding where the ship was going or her activities as expected of her in regards to where it was going was not given.

Anderson expected this. "I know you would have these questions. But for now, stay these thoughts, as you should understand some details are left to be diluted down the chain of command when the time comes."

"I trust you sir."

That was good to hear for him, even if Shepard, privately, would think of what questions she would ask of him. "Are there any matters you wish to discuss that do not relate to the shakedown run?"

Some would be allowed. "Sir, on the transport up I was accompanied by two Master Chief Petty Officers also assigned to the Normandy. Chief Gul and Chief Durante. Do they answer to me?"

Anderson had expected this question, looking back to his desk and the data pad there. Day by day more information about the UNSC and their history had been coming in. The Covenant had made no mention of the UNSC, or another humanity in general, but it was purposeful.

In the days since the Prophet of Destiny and Shipmistress Seylu Karonee declared their intention to cooperate with Alliance and Council authorities and begin integration into the galaxy at large, they had played what they knew of themselves close to their chest. Very little tactically, less regarding their religion, but details of how they organized each species, that they were very capable of defending themselves on the ground and (hopefully in the future) in space. The dead Alliance Marines were mourned for, and, as usual, xenophobic and militaristic cries for reparations and blood for blood were had by the galaxy and humanity, however there always would be those cries regardless.

The one point that made First Contact with the Covenant different was difficulty in itself to understand: that they weren't new to the stars, and knew what it was like to have a galactic empire. Some had thought it a bug in translation, and some hadn't cared, but for the Council, it meant a challenge at some point down the line.

For Anderson, even that was put into the background as the two humans that came with the Covenant were put to question by the Marine deemed to be Humanity's Spectre.

"Yes. They do. But if there are certain topics which they have to defer to me if inquired and needed."

"Special forces though?"

"We're a deep recon frigate, Shepard. Clandestine operations are within this vessel's purpose."

It took a moment, but knowing that those two had answered to her in the end, that was all she needed for now. Still there was a certain unease within her. She liked knowing things, as much as the unknown inspired awe in her to go seek it out, her lower teeth biting into the back of her top lips as she sucked it in. A nervous tic if anything that, once she felt sting, brought her back to reality. "I understand sir."

"Good." Anderson stepped over to Shepard, gesturing to the rifle, she gladly handing it over. He wasn't quite sure on how to use it himself, and Shepard saw it as he rotated it around his hands, unable to comfortably hold without a pistol grip.

"Ah, here, sir." She took it back. "Back in the day a striker primed by this-" She pulled back the bolt with a rack before slamming it forward. "Shot a conical bullet." She pulled the trigger, a dry firing click heard.

"Hmph." Anderson took it back, pleased he knew this knowledge now. "I'll see to it I get a mount for this thing, mount it over, maybe, the weapons lockers downstairs."

"I think that'd be lovely sir."

"Okay. Go get yourself geared up Commander, we're launching soon."

* * *

Steps they had taken before. Albeit at gunpoint and with restraints on. They knew the way down, and some would recognize them. As they were waiting for the elevator on the ship's mid-deck to arrive it was no wonder that they had, both, again the pleasure of seeing the aged woman that had been the Normandy's doctor through the window of the med bay at her desk.

She didn't seem particularly surprised to see them again dressed up as crew, flashing a smile and a wave at the two. JD meekly waved back as Mai gave her nod, stepping into the elevator doors and arriving at the lower deck fast enough: the bay occupied by lockers and, most namely, the infantry fighting vehicle known as the Mako.

A touch more heavily armored than the typical Warthog, and carrying a little more punch, the Normandy had one ready to deploy. Sparsely the Marines of the Normandy had been on one side of the hanger, a handful of them already on board, stowing away their personal equipment in these lockers. Personal ones had been back on the mid-deck.

Strangely enough their lockers had been by the Mako and a utility bench station, separated from the rest. Their rucks dropped to the floor in front of them they had begun the process of moving in. Not that there was much to move.

It was their duty kits, ready for them as they opened the two standing lockers. The weapons at least. Given the particular, odd, mechanical nature of them many weapons could be carried on a single soldier, almost negating designated fireteam assignments. Old habits died hard however, and the requisition forms which they had transmitted prior to arriving on the Normandy made clear that they were best to be good at one weapon, then be average with four.

Well, one designated weapon and a sidearm.

Wasn't the same as his M7, but the M12 Locust SMG was similar in ergonomics as JD found the weapon's case ready for him, the protective foam encasing it even within that case. It was odd just seeing his weapon in his locker, but the Normandy hadn't the room for a dedicated armory, as was why he had reached in and laid his hands on the metal body, holding it and giving a once over to the design. He had fired a similar variant back on Earth at the New Buffalo Alliance Marine Station, and it was, as he understood it, an SMG in earnest. Fast fire rate, lower punch, and controllability as he expected.

There was another aspect that he and Mai however had to get used to, but were already somewhat acquainted with:

These weapons didn't need to be reloaded in practice, much like the Covenant plasma weapons. Each weapon was, in essence, a rail gun: a mass driver not unlike the MAC guns on the UNSC starships and starholds. The limiting factor of them had still been recoil and the internals: overheating possible after prolonged use.

He held the black submachine gun in his hands, aiming to the floor out of not wanting to flag anyone else in the hold, feeling the stock against his shoulder as he had, after getting comfortable with it, went for the black tube that came with the case.

A suppressor, threaded on. He might've been a shock trooper, but staying clandestine was something he was good at.

Mai had seen her single weapon now too: From a distance she might've mistaken this as a BR-55 perhaps, but it hadn't been. Clad in grey like the popular Avenger Assault Rifles in use by the Alliance, the M-13 Rifle was what Mai had been designated. A DMR in practice.

If anyone could cover the full breadth of a battlefield, it would've been her, and this particular weapon had been versatile enough for her to, theoretically, be comfortable having as her duty weapon. A medium to low powered optic sat on its top rail, she peering into it as she also held it against her shoulder and adjusting as usual.

"Turian design, that rifle." A sailor with a beret had moved to the utility station, placing a few boxes down and under for storage. He pointed out to Mai's rifle. "When this ship was being built, we traded a few things here and there with the Turians as well. That rifle was the result of one of those trades. One of the first of its kind."

"You armory officer?" JD asked the man, still holding his SMG idle. He had been struggling to find a place to mount a sling, but there had been none.

"Reacquisitions, so in a way yes." The sailor answered, fanning his head with his beret. "Keep track of inventory and all that. Welcome aboard. Your stuff is back over there, I would've moved it to your lockers but it's, well, I would've asked Kaiden for help."

It was near the center of the bay, unmoved since a loader probably dropped it off. Mai went to rectify that as they both automatically moved to it. If it was theirs then, both secretly hoped, it contained pieces of themselves that they didn't feel whole without.

It was hardly the most proper way her armor had been carried, and it was her armor, the weight alone confirming it. In a steel box large enough, and heavy enough, it very much required a loader. Fortunately, Mai had known the weight as she had dragged it over to her cot and the lockers by the Mako.

It drew the eye of the crew to see her lug it across, however she had wasted no breath in it, not as it was dropped and hit the floor again, she opening its door and revealing something old, familiar, and yet renewed all the same.

Side by side, it was explained why it felt heavier than she expected. "JD." She spoke as the man had tightened the threading on his SMG's suppressor, putting it back and into his locker as he came over to see what she did.

The recquisitions officer thought it odd he hadn't minimized it, but paid no mind to it as he moved away. The two of them, to him, smelled of clandestine spookiness that he thought it best not to interfere with. Especially as Mai rose a portion of an item out of the box.

Their armor, ripe as rain, and, hopefully, mostly unmodified.

There had been a datapad attached to the door of it. She had read it, a time lock of its self-destructing, data wise, nature making her speed through it:

* * *

_-FOR YOUR EYES ONLY-_

_Alliance Armorers confirmed: MJOLNIR technologically far beyond any comparable armor system in galactic usage. Combat effectiveness as observed and theorized deem it to be the future in human armored warfare systems. Chief Gul, you are responsible for maintenance and cataloguing of said maintenance of this armor for future operations, and eventually, RD into native development as gleamed from this suit (and from Chief Durante's BDU). Listed below are modifications deemed necessary._

_-From the Desk of Admiral Steven Hackett, Fifth Fleet_

* * *

She had looked down at said modifications. Nothing too egregious:

Her blue data pad had been removed and quarantined for study in its contents, which she understood, replaced with an Alliance military mode omni-tool bracer. Otherwise, on top of her energy shields, a supplemental kinetic barrier had been on top of it. Two pronged shields, which was enjoyable. Otherwise the biofoam reserves in the techsuit and armor had been emptied and retrofitted with medigel instead. Even her knives were returned. She carried two. One in her chest holster, the other on her hip.

One for each hand if it came down to it.

It often did come down to it.

She rose the torso piece out of the locker, the smooth feeling of a new layer of paint, protective layering, and sheen in general hadn't been too out of place with standard Alliance infantry armor. Color alone had hid its… otherworldly nature.

That wasn't what she had been looking for however as she turned it over to the back piece.

She was satisfied. The module used for her active camouflage was still there. Reverse engineered from the armor systems of Elite Spec Ops, she had used it to much success and. The clarity provided by it had been tenfold the effectiveness of common military issue active camo in the Alliance, at least according to her eyes, and the fact it remained, it gave her solace.

While she was busy looking over her armor, JD had gone for his, taking his helmet out, also observing that new paint job. On both of their armor had been some signage toward them being Systems Alliance, but nothing particularly branding. Perhaps the most notable one was the grey that had once gone down JD's helmet in a stripe. It was replaced: replaced with the blood red.

The emblem of the N7s were red for a reason: they symbolized the blood lost by pioneers and heroes for humanity. Perhaps this was a clue to his capability to the casual observer without outright stating he wasn't an N7.

He was told, during that prior week, he had been judged to be of worthy merit to be an N7, but could not be. He was better than them, perhaps, according to his combat footage provided. A new designation perhaps would be made accounting for him and anyone who could match. Perhaps, more importantly, was the consideration by the effectiveness, of the grade, that Mai had now put.

Humanity had not had people that could match the Matriarchs of the Asari, or the Battlemasters of the Krogan. Now however they did in the form of a woman named Mai.

A Spartan.

She was a Demon in plain sight, the urge to put on that legendary armor of hers and keep it on for the next few years tempting, but something she beat down as she placed it all back into the locker. With JD's armor removed the locker itself would be fine enough for storage between missions. At least his could fit in his locker.

Mai herself just could not fit in much of anything, both in the military and now, as she had learned in the recent weeks, the civilian world. No sleeper pod, the Alliance's version of cryogenic stasis for the longer trips, had been able to be provided to her, and the solution to her plight being a cot (or rather two), placed next to her locker. Even in the hotel she had to scrunch up and sleep diagonally.

Anderson had alerted her of this and requested on behalf of her arrangements for a pod that would fit her, but it was all on short notice: an oversight. She told him to not bother. She would adjust.

JD looked it over in all of its plain bareness, frowning. "Could req a pillow you know." Not even a sheet.

She shook her head. "Don't need it."

"Well," he started slowly. "If not for you, me. I never really needed cryo or that stuff. Opted out."

And just by that measure alone he had ended up looking older than men he had, chronologically, been the same age as. At least a year more of natural time progression having done him in during the war.

"Volunteer skeleton crew?" Mai tilted her head at him. He nodded.

"Ship is quieter. And I don't need cryo to just knock myself out."

He was right she knew.

They had still rolled through sharing shifts for security, one awake, one not during their stay in New Buffalo. Either out of comfort or just pure curiosity keeping the observing one awake, those nights had often been lonely, if not informative based on Extranet reading.

Despite that, they still learned little bits and pieces about themselves. Mai learned that JD could literally just close his eyes and fall asleep, and JD learned that she had been a stomach sleeper after her tossing and turnings from the visions in her sleep. The ones he had as well.

_"Do you have night terrors?" Mai asked one night as he woke up, before she was to go to sleep herself._

_He paused at her, a flash of sorrow on his face, hard realization, before he tried flashing a smile her way unsuccessfully. "Yeah. Not that bad though…" he paused for a bit before looking at her, still staring at him as if expecting more. He gave her that. "Do you know about yours?"_

_She nodded, an eyebrow raised. "Is it…. Not supposed to be like that?"_

_God no. It wasn't._

"Do you mind if I… uh-" What was he saying? "Ah nevermind, I'll just get used to the sleeperpods."

She didn't get what he was about to ask, and so she let it go, closing her locker, the container with MJOLNIR just to the side. She had flashed a looked at JD's locker before reminding herself that this was his first time using it as well. There would be no information she could gleam, glimpse, find a hint of. The decorations and amenities of a locker on a ship often told much about a Marine: pictures of loved ones, either pure or full bearing, places from before the war, things worth fighting for. Marines loved to be reminded of things.

JD never had been one however to carry in his locker. After his third ship was destroyed after a Drop, he never bothered with holding onto trinkets with the knowledge that permanence on a duty post would always end up in disaster for him.

Things were different however, this time around.

He reached into his helmet, beneath the thermal and ballistic underlay.

She was blonde, a cute bobcut on display in that candid photo of her in a sundress. Same age as him, and generally, for her profession as a dock worker handling loading and unloading cargo, on the smaller side. Her eyes were bright, shining, her face that of the sun itself it seemed based on the lighting of the picture he had taken.

They might've been casual sex partners at the very most, but he couldn't deny that she was beautiful. Something that was, if anything he had, worth fighting for (or, at least, looking forward to).

He had caught Mai staring, she quickly, failing to persuade him that she was doing something else, looking away vaguely.

He smirked at her embarrassment. "Her name's Dawn. Met her on shore leave on Cascade about two years ago."

At a bar naturally that his ODST squad at the time dragged him to.

JD had, at Dawn's insistence, admit to himself that he was conventionally attractive for a Marine. Of all that had been done to him nothing had hurt his handsome face: one that hadn't been macho and masculine as one expected from a shock trooper, but was a face one could describe on country boys and sweet summer children grown into adults. He looked "Safe", whatever that meant from her.

Mai had, vaguely, blocked out whether if he had talked about this person before. They had a lot of information to process those last two weeks and she couldn't exactly remember if this person was among them. Talk of their reality was sparse.

"Was she a soldier?"

JD shook his head. "Civilian sector. Ran a detail on one of the space elevators."

"Are you…?"

JD never had any family to explain this situation to in that clunky, awkward way. When pressed by his fellow ODSTs he could use the course and rude language that would have made any sort of revelation to blood relatives somewhat crude.

He shook his head. "We were…" he tried to dance around using the term _fuck buddies_ out of politeness. "Casual acquaintances."

"A friend?"

"A physical friend."

"Physical…?"

She wouldn't have known, JD kept reminding himself. Any sort of intricate social relationship that was imbued with the overarching context of how normal people developed and dealt with each other had been robbed of her, all the way to knowing that casual hookups were a thing.

"Whenever I had time off I would spend time with her for physical pleasure's sake."

Mai's eyes had widened for a moment before her face returned to its neutral, a hint of processing still lingering. "Do you miss her?"

He missed everyone. "Not more than anyone else I've seen come and go..." Any answer he could've given was cold, but with the war, death was always on the doorstep, everyday: one's last. He paused, putting her photo on the shelf in his locker. Part of her draw to him had been simple: she had wanted to join the Corp so badly, but every time she had gone to a recruiting station she had backed away and was sick of herself. She was scared. She wasn't a bad person by any means, and he'd been afraid if what little he let on had painted her like that. "I think of her sometimes. When I need the peace."

"Oh." Was all Mai could say quietly, like a breath. She didn't make the move to, but her right hand twitched where it was, the impulse to reach out and touch upon his shoulder present, but not acted on.

It was no matter. Not when JD had put that discussion away as he had gone to his armor again, looking to the chest section: the padded armor plate. Wedged between the steel plate used for protection and its sheath had been something else:

Fabric, torn and faded, barely survived, gone from its days as a thick ceremonial piece. Red and gold fibers had been dirtied by dirt and his own blood, time and time again. He hadn't known if it would be prudent to pull it all out, but he at least needed to show her. To let her know that he would always know what he was:

He had beckoned her over with a finger, and, oddly, she nodded before moving over. It was if she was responding to an order, not an ask.

Sliding it out of his chest piece it had been revealed:

An ODST flag. A blazing drop pod, emblazoned with a skull and a unit: 7th MEU. 7th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

"It's nice." She offered comment, and he taking it with a nod as he slipped it back in.

He'd used it to pay respects in battle, to place it upon dirty mounds used as graves. After so many of his fellow ODST, fellow human, had died for him, in combat with him, this was the only way he could not go insane: To give them the respect they deserved, even if he had to claw their plots with his bare hands, even if he had been the only one to attend their funerals, sometimes a dozen at a time as he laid the flag over their bodies and gave them moments of silence.

If he had shown her that then, maybe, at the very least… give and take. That's how she had imagined how the most basic of human relationships worked. 1:1.

Her hand drew into her shirt, pulling the string around her neck, feeling a hastily made necklace come out.

He wanted to ask, but didn't want to insinuate he had been looking where it lay. Not that he was looking anyway. Military uniforms naturally did their best to hide whatever was desirable to Marines a long way from home, both in this world and their own. Still Mai had been nurtured to be as big as she could, and her body grew like wise. Only her armor could really, truly contain her.

He knew what she was going to pull out before it had come.

"When they took me-" She still hadn't even believe she was uttering those words to someone, and she stumbled. JD had understood though as he waited patiently, closing his locker, no one else within earshot. "When ONI took me for the Spartan program, they didn't allow any of my life to follow… burned the clothes I was in at the time."

She felt winded, talking about it, turning her body around, back against their lockers, head up and at the dim lights of the bay.

JD found a stool, dragging it over, sitting on it. It was important for her, and to her, to talk about this. That alone he knew. If he were in the same position he'd hoped someone would be there to listen. He had listened all his life, to every story spoken to him by other ODSTs. From raunchy to heartfelt, personal to jokes, he remembered what they wanted to tell him, and thus, he remembered their names.

Major Anna Duquette, 112th Helljumper Division. Left behind her children, and her wife.

PFC Silus Iglesias. 54th Marines. Owned twenty rescue dogs by the time he died.

Lieutenant Youji Itami. 7TH MEU, Delta Company. He was like JD in many ways, and for that, they were bunk buddies. Read a lot of comics to distract himself. He hoped that Itami survived the glassing of New Ginza.

The names went on and on, most dead, some unlucky to be alive, but he remembered them all, and, no matter what, he would remember Mai Gul, Spartan B-312. Born on New Jerusalem, kidnapped and conscripted to become a genetically enhanced super soldier. She missed her mom.

"I remembered my mother…" she drifted off still. "She had a necklace like this… but metal." She had been almost quick to point out.

"You remembered it?"

She nodded once fiercely, putting it back. "I know what it means. It's religious. But I don't think… I don't think she saw it that way." JD tilted her head, urging her to go on, to say it aloud. "The wheel means, I think, it keeps turning. Renewal, regardless of where you are on it…"

"The next life, if you lived rightly, if you lived as best you can, will be better."

Once, in another world, in another life, Mai was a dirt-poor vagrant, looking upon it now with a life in between.

Right then and there, there was no indication that she had been that, or JD had been an ODST. They blended into where they found themselves, and the only ones who knew really who each other were were themselves. A realization that came in inches, not declarations.

"Wake me when you need me." For now, with nothing to do, nothing left to do in his routine of getting acclimated to new ships, JD made his decision to simply put his back to the lockers as well, sit along the floor, and close his eyes. According to their duty roster they had no duties assigned other than be ready.

Mai had wondered if it was indicative of a serious medical condition on how easy JD fell asleep, but he had the second he closed his eyes, but she could imagine how it would be craved after by many a restless Marine. She herself had trouble sleeping, not used to lulling herself asleep by choice. It was either exhaustion in the field where even her body couldn't take it, or by the urge of creeping cold by cryosleep.

As they did for the last two weeks Mai did the only thing she felt obligated to do: keep watch as JD slept.

* * *

Shepard entered into the bay via the elevator, taking in the smell of steel that the electricity of the ship's core very near. It wasn't time for a tour of the ship, but she, at least, was getting a lay of the land and where she would get her guns.

Her quick eye had observed Chief Gul present with a dozing Chief Durante, the former not so gently kicking the man in his side and spurring him to his feet at observance.

"Officer on deck!"

One of the Marines cried out.

Her eyes had been glued to the two Chiefs however as she emerged out of the elevator, the weight of who they were drawing her to them like gravity, as far as gaze was alone.

JD woke up as men of readiness always do: panicked, fists clenched, and sprung.

"At ease." Whoever was presented relaxed, however her voice rose loud enough. It was the voice she used for orders. "Captain's telling me to suit up. That means everyone else too, you read?"

"Oorah." The handful of the Marines in their responded. They were already up and at it. Putting on armor would be no hassle. It was Shepard's first orders to them, and there was no break in period really necessary. The Marines had cause to trust her.

She was, to everyone but herself, a good officer. One people dreamed of serving under.

Those orders came and hit Mai and, if it hadn't been for conditioning, she would've been giddy.

JD's locker had opened as soon as the orders came down. The jumpsuit that was worn on top of his duty clothes had been zipped up fast, both by practice and by experience, sealing himself in, making anything that hadn't been his head able to deal with any EVA or similar environments. After that everything else had been slap, clack, and rolling. The armor plates of his torso, shins, boots, shoulders, donned in a flash as he had summed it up with his helmet being put on and, for the first time in the longest time he had gone without it, the standard HUD of a UNSC ODST came over him in a wash.

"JD." Mai's voice had him turn over. It took him less than thirty seconds to don his armor. Putting on his armor during a Covenant boarding raid had made it so he had done it that fast after that even had happened.

Combat couldn't prepare him to, again, see Mai naked.

Shepard had been halfway to her locker when she spared a look toward the other side. No armor system she had known, required the user to get buck naked, which was why she stared and saw an unbelievably formed and toned woman strut her stuff, either on purpose or without caring, and slip into an undersuit that she had never seen before.

Shepard wasn't the only one who saw this happen, and, soon enough, as Marines finished and realized that their was something to look at, they had seen a sight not many humans had been liable to see in their universe, and from where those two came from.

Taking off MJOLNIR her own was by itself a unique skill, inherited from Ambrose during her training. Putting it back on was, again, a more difficult, unique skill. One she mastered, even if it meant she would need, at the very least, ten minutes to do so on her own, twisting and bending about her own body to make sure all the joints and pins were able to connect and be forced together by her own strength and not a tool.

Having another person there would've helped. Having JD there, to learn, she thought, was worth it.

Her armor came in pieces, front and backs, halves to the whole. The only thing that really hadn't been like that was her helmet, and that had been last.

"Clasp each one around where it needs to go until you feel a magnetic charge kick and seize. I'll do the rest." She said hurriedly, unnaturally, stuttering during it. She never asked for help in her life, and now she wanted it.

It was vulnerability that came and swept her as JD, in a nod, did what he was asked, collecting from the box that stored her armor, piece by piece, collection by collection, as she bent down after her techsuit sealed itself around her form and went for her arm pieces.

It left JD with the waist down to work with.

She stepped into the suit's armored boots easily enough, JD, in the same movement, forcing the shin guards over her legs until they latched on by a force he couldn't see, grooves in the tech suit hooking on as hissing and matching began to echo through pieces of the suit that were being attached to her.

Shins, knee-pads, thighs, even her groin.

Like this, JD thought Mai, unconsciously, more as a machine, even with his hands places that would make other people definitely uncomfortable. He did what he needed to do, and for that, Mai was thankful. Not that she would've seen what he had been doing and where his hands had been going any other way, he clamping his hands around her right thigh and squeezing the armor till it clicked on. There were holes, inlets, almost for screws and ports, he had seen. Small, obviously needing some sort of proprietary tool. Surrounding said holes were scratch marks, almost as if-

In all of its glory, her armor had been on, but not tightened, the process not complete.

He heard a knife being drawn out from her hip and he backed away, standing up, only to see Mai replace him and take the knife to herself to those ports.

As she found each one she had twisted the knife into those ports, her titanium armor settling in and hugging tight with the final steps she had learned to subvert completed.

He found his helmet in her hand, picked up without him even realizing it. Her hair was already in a bun so now, all that was left was-

She reached out, almost seizing it from JD, but as half a tug came violently she stopped herself. Her mouth opened for a moment, her eyes to her helmet, and then to JD. His helmet was depolarized but for the first time in her life she had tried to see past it.

"JD can I please-…" She asked. Truly asked. Courtesy.

"Yeah, yeah. Here." He let go, and she had it, placing it over her head, the black visor filling her vision before it clicked around her, layering over the neck portion of her techsuit and sealing.

When she opened her eyes after a blink her vision returned to her, her HUD was there, and her life as she knew it was returned to her.

She was, and always would be, a Spartan. Despite the last two weeks this particular moment and how she felt so alive in her armor, that would always remain with her. It was the rest of the implications of her being a Spartan that JD wanted her to work on; that he wanted to help her with.

They looked at each other, almost chest to chest.

Just shy of four minutes that took. She was satisfied for now.

"Did I do everything right?" The ODST asked the Spartan.

Her helmet bobbed up and down. "Yeah. You did." They both heard footsteps approach, but before they turned she decided he had deserved this much: "Thank you."

JD couldn't respond as they found an armored up Commander Shepard standing before them, their bodies standing rigid straight again in their gear.

The commander looked to JD, then to Mai, to JD, but then, expectedly, remaining on Mai. The entire damn hanger was. They might've thought her big before but she now stood at a six-foot-nine in that unknown armor. Nearly seven feet. JD himself was a healthy 6'1, but yet standing next to her he seemed dwarfed in every dimension.

"Good god." Shepard finally let out. As if she was staring at a pair of Machiavellian statues. "What did I drag onboard this ship."

It wasn't said in malice, in expectation. It was said in curiosity, in awe, and, in all honesty, amusement.

Mai looked down on her. "Ma'am, are you not briefed on us?"

Shepard ran a gloved hand through her red hair. "Not as much as I'd like. But as I said before, I'd like it from the horse's mouth."

When JD and Mai depolarized their visors Shepard was shocked for a second. She'd never seen something like that before from Alliance issue helmets.

Chief Durante, wearing the colors of the N7s down his helmet (she knew that red very intimately), his armor, even by their standards, seemed thick and utilitarian. Less about metal protection and more about insulation it seemed. Faintly, reflected in his eyes, she saw a HUD, a goodness to honest heads up display that even she wasn't issued often.

"This…" JD remembered how they had called her out for the old rifle of hers not being standard issue. He could taste the irony in the filtered air of the helmet. He had a script, or at least, a guideline as provided by Admiral Hackett on how to proceed. _Tell the truth, but not the origin_. "This armor is a prototype all in one system for Alliance special forces and, more specifically, shock troopers."

"You're a shock trooper?" Shepard asked. "May I see your helmet?"

Reluctantly, but not seeing a reason to, he had relented, unclasping it and handing it to her. She felt it in her hand, feeling the paint, hiding how old that particular helmet actually was. There were new revisions of the ODST BDU he could've filed a request for, but he saw no use. He was comfortable with that particular model and so no need to upgrade.

It would've been a breach of personal space for her to put on that helmet, she knew, so she relented after running her hands over the polycarbonate, fingers touching upon glass that was surely hardened before she handed it back. It went on again.

"Yes ma'am. Shock trooper. That role in itself is… experimental, but I know the doctrine and training very well."

"I see… still, I wonder what type of missions were going to be in if we need a shock trooper. Historically those type of troops are used only for deep ops or hardened position taking." Shepard said skeptically.

Both of which he was experienced with (or rather, had survived before).

"This armor looks pretty cool, if I say so myself." Asides from the fact that there had been a giant red mark where his head was that would've otherwise given snipers a target, the blacks and greys that had been originally on it were renewed by whoever in the Alliance handled it recently. He was inclined to agree with her assessment, but he was not to be the focus of that shakedown. Shepard gazed upon Mai, unmoving, looking straight ahead. "But what is this I wonder? Also experimental?"

Mai's script given to her was a little more… comprehensive. That and she stuck with almost to the dot. "I am equipped with a Skunkworks project known as Project MJOLNIR: a prototype armor system which combines multiple classified elements in order to explore force effectiveness in the field for future and currently experimental Systems Alliance infantry-based combat systems."

Shepard was unsurprised by the answer that came with Mai. "I was wondering what armor was going to fit you. I thought my measurements were always difficult, but yours?"

"This armor was designed, specifically, for me ma'am."

"Right." Shepard nodded along, beating back the impulse to reach out and just touch her chest plate. "Anything you can tell me that isn't classified? A summary perhaps? Just so I know what I can expect."

"This armor system is comprised of, at a basic level, an outer titanium shell coated in special materials to help it deflect or absorb weapons fire if the energy shields go down-"

Shepard rose her eyebrow. "Energy shields?" Not Eezo.

"Yes ma'am. As I said this suit is experimental, and one of the directives of the project was to create an armor system that runs without Element Zero."

"What? This thing must weight a ton, then."

"It is a ton ma'am, with me in it." Shepard's eyes widened, looking to the floor, hoping it could take it. To be fair to her, on that day of all days, it wouldn't be the weirdest thing she would come to know. Mai continued. "Beneath the titanium shell is a techsuit underlay, itself layered with several designed linings which enhance my strength, combat impulses and actions, and survivability."

Shepard glanced back at JD. "Is your armor of the same capability."

He shook his head. "No ma'am. We share a general HUD software, but nothing more substantial than that."

"Hm." Shepard thought to herself, looking back to Mai. "Enhanced reaction time and strength?"

"The nature of which is classified ma'am."

A clue, whether Mai meant it or not. Shepard tapped her head with a finger. "You know, I have an L3 Implant, so I know what it's like to have improved senses… and I know, sometimes, if I go overboard, time slows down for me, because my body can't handle it. The human mind was never meant to race as fast as some biotics do." She was a Biotic. Not a particularly strong one at that, but she had potential. She prided herself more as a rifleman, but, here and there, when the situation called for it, she used the abilities given to her as best she could. Some of her hair had fallen onto her face, touching upon the freckles on her nose as she looked back to her men, casting their nosy gazes away when she did. She swept those loose strands behind her ear, gracing over the scar left behind from that implant surgery. "Have you gone under the knife for the sake of combat effectiveness? I don't see why the Alliance would put work into muscle suits again, last time they were a thing they proved more trouble than they were worth."

The smallest of flinches on Mai's part. "Classified ma'am."

"I see. So I suppose you're nearly seven feet naturally, right?" No comment. Behind the visor Mai grit her teeth. Shepard meant no harm, but she had a way with words. JD had picked up on it fast. She prodded like his father. Getting information out of people when they didn't realize it. "So if he's a shock trooper, then what are you?"

"Whatever you want me to be ma'am. I'm at your discretion."

Spartans were not people. They were weapons. JD felt a pang in his chest that Mai, again, even in a world away, fell back into those grooves.

"Hmph. I've got a feeling you're a type of bad ass I've not yet seen in this galaxy, Mai… might be good though." Shepard drifted off. "I hear the Covenant on Altis are pretty deadly, and you might be what we need to go stop them if they're intentions aren't peaceful."

If only she knew.

There was one last thing, Mai suppose she could've been straight with Shepard with. "Ma'am. This suit is equipped with a prototype stealth system. Due to a lack of Eezo, it has a considerable charge and breadth of usage."

"And here I was thinking you'd only be good at kicking down buildings." Shepard said with a good-hearted comment. Mai could do that too, but she wouldn't say then. Shepard had enough to chew on. "Is there any way you could explain?"

The switch for it was in her right hand, on the back of her right thumb, easily pressed by her right index finger.

JD had seen this done once from her, back on Altis. She disappeared into thin air, refractions of the air barely revealing her as in the dim light she became invisible and Shepard, impressed, stepped back, looking to where the figure of Mai had been and then scanning. Some of the Marines who hadn't been paying attention had did a double take as they saw that massive women disappear from view. Only to reappear behind Shepard a good minute later.

Invisibility devices for combat had been around recently, but clunky, lasting barely a few seconds. This was something else.

Then again that could've been said for both JD and Mai in general, Shepard clapping with her hands once or twice as she turned back around and stood chest to chest with Mai. The commander was 5'10, Mai having a foot and then some on her in the armor, but yet she was not intimidated at all, if nothing else, if anything at all-

"I've got a feeling, on the ground, we're gonna get along just fine, Chief Gul, Chief Durante."

"I hope so ma'am." JD politely uttered. Mai said nothing however, looking down on her. She was impressed. Lesser men, even her would be allies in the UNSC infantry, would be scared to death, menaced by her this close. The Alliance had reacted the same save for, and there was a trend here, the N7s.

Something which Shepard very much was. "Tell me JD, are you and me cut from the same cloth?" She turned back around to him, his hands behind his back held.

"For my own safety, I'm not predisposed to discuss anything of that nature, commander."

"I see." Shepard finally relented, knocking her fist gently on Mai's armor, feeling the metal of an armor system that was probably as important as the Normandy itself to the Alliance. "You responsible for fit and care for this?"

"Yes ma'am. I'm the only one who knows how."

The commander backed off finally after getting her feel. "Well, I hope I have the privilege of knowing how you perform soon… hopefully not at the cost of life though."

Mai nodded. It was a position she was going to take based on Shepard's advice in the shuttle, and the commander was pleased she did.

"Testing…. Testing…. Testing 1-2-3." The ship's PA blared on, too loud, then too soft, but then just right. "I can't believe they gave the pilot access to the intercom on this ship!" It was a joyous voice, that of a man who was having his fun. "Now no one can avoid my insightful and witty dialog."

Shepard rose the omni-tool on her wrist to her mouth. "Lieutenant Moreau?"

"Aw shit-" The voice on the PA cut off, only to reappear from Shepard's wrist. "Is this the channel for the Normandy's XO?"

"Yes." Shepard was a little annoyed, but then again it was what she expected. "I'd be careful with your usage of the ship's comm systems you know. Never know what we could hear."

"Ah- uh. Right commander. Anyway, come up to the bridge. We're dusting off right now and figured you'd like a look."

"On my way." Shepard walked backward slowly toward the elevator again, gear now on, just as ordered by the Captain, but who was she but proper with conversations? "I should go." She left them with. "But I'll talk with you too later over combat tactics!" Her words echoed as the elevator door closed, as if she was a kid wanting to get a view of a parade she went off toward the helm.

Left alone, the Marines in the bay leaving them be, it was a state JD and Mai were getting used to with each other. Eye to eye, through the visors, words were spoken without voice.

Mai felt the Normandy detach from the station, flying off, through her feet. She wasn't particularly enthralled by it: setting off now on a new journey.

'Are you okay?' Said with a motion of JD's palm.

'Yeah.' A nod in response, Mai returning to him, pausing at his side, but continuing back to her locker pulling her rifle out and to the utility station. Working on her weapons, modifying, making sure it fit her completely and without question, this should could distract herself with, back turned to her ODST. She didn't want to talk, a stool which strained itself under her weight sat in. Shepard had, then and there, been exhausting.

Maybe, if this were a UNSC ship, JD would've let it be and gone off to the other side of the hanger, introduce himself, at least in name, to the other Marines and learn theirs. To soak in who they were, but at an arm's length. To know what names to listen to in battle. Though this was a new ship, new crew, new service.

Things would be different, even if who they were was the same; whatever that was going to do to them, complications and all.

It meant that, standing there by himself, JD did the only thing he really knew how to do and walk to Mai's side, to his locker, and then put his back against it and doze off in her shade.

Oddly it was comforting, to him and her.

In the coming days he had heard from Hackett and Anderson, patches to the software in JD and Mai's helmets would be offered and installed. It was to account for their new operating procedures and who they were fighting with and against, but for now as they were, JD falling asleep with his helmet on, he heard the faint broadcasts from the cockpit from that Lieutenant Moreau go through procedure. It was almost like white noise.

_"The Arcturus Prime Relay is in range… initiating transmission sequence."_

* * *

A/N: I usually keep author's notes on the top, but I didn't want to mess with that oh so clean formatting.

So yeah, here we are again, beginning of a story, shout out to my Manifest Destiny readers who are also one this. I'm using this story to destroy any writer's block I have with it so hey, win-win. Also, as usual, because I love reusing characters, Hitman will show , for those of you who are just becoming acquainted with me: as the profile says I am a a military-oriented writer. I understand military procedure and all that tacticool language to use it believably and I have a feel for combat scenes at this point. I'm a fighter, I'm a writer, and in bed I'll probably bite her.

Jokes asides, it just means there will be a certain element of writing you don't see elsewhere, as in adherence, or at least, acknowledgement to military norms and staples, along with etiquette and brevity.

I also use A/Ns to answer any reviews that I think are worth also answering publicly, so here are the first batch:

_Halospartan - _ _"Throughout the story I have seen the you have JD/Rookie's rank wrong according to the halo wiki he is a Lance Corporal. Now what I have said does not mean I don't like the story I do like it just was pointing out an inaccuracy in your story. That's all."_

**JD wasn't a Lance until he came back to Earth, at this point, as evidenced by the Halo Short Story "Dirt", he is still a private.**

_Guest - "Very rarely have I wanted to call someone an idiot, but you make me want to call you such. Six based on any and all Spartans, aside from Soren would have fought the removal of the armor and more likely informed the folks of the SA that if they continued, she'd set off the fusion reactor and blow the armor and her to shreds. Especially as a Spartan 3, who are even more suicidally loyal to the UNSC. It makes no sense what so ever, for her to even allow that. Sorry mate, even at the expense of dying she wouldn't. That's how serious they are. Anyone's SOD holding up after that, needs to see a doctor."_

**Tad bit rude, aren't ya? But as people like Uberch01 and **Halo Star Wars X-over fan** have said, the Spartan-IIIs are by no means as you understand them. Even just by observance to the games, that suicidal loyalty you seem very protective of is cast asides by the Chief in Halo 4 and 5 in response to him siding with Cortana. And, if anything, if you read, you'll understand why the Spartan-IIIs, why Mai, would falter in such loyalty at all, if not any of the Spartans. If anything you help me demonstrate a point: you misunderstand the Spartans as these crazy death machines who themselves are willing to die in such a way, betraying their humanity.**_That One Guy - "I've said it once I'll say it again: this fic is by far my most favorite on this site. The amount of detail that goes into this is incredible! Also, your writing style makes this fun to read, keep it up!_

_Nitpicking here, the Covenant aide of the story is my not so favorite part (maybe it's because I'm more of a HFY kinda guy). But don't listen to me, you do what you feel is best for this story."_

**Thanks for the kind words! But I implore you, keep in touch with the Covenant's side of things. They'll collide down the line, surely, just as the Arbiter and the Chief did. Same goes for you JapaneseOptics. As I stated in the Foreword, a lot of Halo's magic is lost if the Covenant and the Forerunners aren't in the equation, so they have a place in this galaxy, and this story.**

_Guest - Just a question... With your mention of the migrant fleet i got the feeling that you plan to have ranoch (im doubting i spelled that right) be the same planet as Sanghelios, but arent both the covenant and UNSC almost solely in the Orion arm of the Milky Way or am I wrong there? Cause if so, Sanghelios wouldn't be able to be Ranoch_

**Okay, like some of the reviews asking me questions such as reverse engineering and things of that nature, I usually won't respond to them because, well, it's a story, find out by reading, if I can respectfully say, but this question steps on another topic: sources. Well to be honest I am not that neck deep into Halo lore and extra material, and what maps I have of the Halo Galaxy aren't the best or most understandable, but from what I've been able to interpret is that Rannoch and Sanghelios fall, well, close enough. For the purposes of this story, especially one where I have a lot of parallels and allusions, roll with it, please, promise it'll be worth it.** **Thanks to all of the shining reviews! My door is always open if you want to talk! Any feedback will be taken to heart!**


	8. 1-2: Contact Harvest

**A/N**: A few notes on the lore here and there, across both fandoms, just so we can have a common understanding:

The Prophet of Destiny does believe in the Great Journey. He is not Truth, Regret, or Mercy. They are one of the few, if not the only in the entire Covenant to know the lie that the Age of Reclamation is based upon. As in they knew that the humans were the chosen Reclaimers of the Forerunners, not them. That lie has followed the Solace. To Destiny, to the entire contingent of the Solace Survivors, the humans are heretical as truth. With the being removed from their universe, and thus, the truth that the Arbiter revealed that would lead to the great Schism, the Covenant in the Mass Effect universe will not come to understand this as they did. Humans are a scourge, same as they were in the year gone past. They work with the humans of the System Alliance now, and also hide their history with humanity, because it is expediant to their survival and tolerable given a few stretches of faith of these humans not being the "same".

Generally, it is now understood by the Covenant that they are fish out of water, and thus, in a different reality all together. Their playbook is not the law anymore.

I saw some shit flinging in the reviews, so, in general, I'm going to address this here:

I'll always defer to the games as the canon for this story's "feel" and tone. As in I am establishing Mai as superhuman, a supersoldier, playing off the power fantasy as presented in Halo, and all of the limitations as such. Her capability is off the charts, and cannot be, at least now, met by any in Mass Effect. She is not unbeatable however. Biotics especially. But in reality her combat effectiveness is not the reason you're reading this story hopefully.

Mass Effect and Halo elements will play with each other, taking themselves apart.

This isn't a story about Halo tech being better than ME tech or vice versa. Or about a war, a curb stomp. No this is a story where I intend to talk about the idea of the Spartans when they are made to face themselves; on the Covenant finding a place in the Galaxy, and, if it fails, each species finding its own path; societal, moral questions of what it means to be good, to be human, and to be the best you can be.

JD and Mai are hyper militaristic, and, when contrasted with the Alliance, with the Galaxy even, they are both a promise of what humanity can be, and a warning to all. They are the worst case scenario, and they have suffered for it.

I mean I will regard the technological nuances with as high a regard I can, without sacrificing story telling. Shout out to **Contra140** for verbalizing this in his review.

Same thing about reviews. I'll try my best to answer those that I think would be good for me to respond to, but as always, I want to story tell, not, well, tell, so don't expect much.

Before I get to reviews, I'll just say that this is a Mass Effect story first, at least in its frame. That being said Mai and JD are my focus here upmost. All I'm saying is that everyone will get the attention I see fit that they need.

Review responses:

**Zeus501 **said _"So question...How on Earth isn't a Spartan Leagues Better then an N7? Spartans are literally Super Human. Like I get that you don't want this to be a UNSC curbstomp fic, but Bringing in a Spartan, kinda makes it like that by Default. I mean, if 6 Had wanted to, she could have Killed the Majority of the Crew on board that Training Ship in her Armor. Combine that with the Rookie, who is Equal to an N7 in Skill, and you get a Very Powerful, damn Near Unstoppable team. - um, the S-III's were generally around 6-8 years old when they volunteered for the Program. They were 14 when they were Agumented. - Why did you Make JD not a Marine? It would Make sense for him to stay in the Branch that he is Most Comfortable in. But I do enjoy this story, its rare to see the Rookie in one of these Fics. Good for you, and to be honest, its a nice change with Having 6 in the fic as well, most of these have John as the Crossover Element."_

Well generally I'm sure it's in her power to kill everyone, but I doubt she could've. Even she fell to the Covenant in the end, and in the situation she was in, she by far could not be able to do any damage. And why would she? I recognize the Spartans power, but I'm also realistic when going by game logic, in my own creative process I find a nice gully between both extended canon and game canon in the depiction of the power fantasy.

In this fic, I do make Mai older than her other Spartan-IIIs. Carter himself was actually 11 when conscripted, so seeing her as 13-14, and at that an underdeveloped one given her circumstances, is not a stretch to me.

As for why the branch mix up? Well the Alliance Navy is weird. The Marines are very much more a part of the Navy in this world than anything, and it shouldn't be an issue for him.

**Ethan76 **said "_I really love this story, and I'm going over it because it is simply a fun read until you post a new chapter. My only complaints, are why do you use bold text rather than italics, at least when your emphasis on speech. Second, you shouldn't use Human ranks on Elites, they are Minor, Major, Ultra, Zealot, General, and Field Marshal (With a few exceptions for SpecOps, Honor Guard, and Navy). Lastly, why on Earth are they not informing the rest of the Council that they pulled data from somewhere (They could even say the Covenant Ship or from the dead ODSTs) about them being an extremely dangerous and advanced group of Aliens bent on genocide? Or at the very least inform the Human negotiators... Keeping my eyes peeled for an update but I expect it to take time_."

I can answer the Covenant rank one. Honestly I do expand Usze's rank of Lieutenant into First Lieutenant Major, and I'm willing to believe that there are breakdowns in "Minor" and "Major" alone much like Corporal/Lance Corporal, PFC and Privates, etc and etc. But yes I'll keep this in mind going on. As to why the humans are hiding what they know? Well it's a very tenuous time, given Shepard's own mission and the drive to get onto the Council. This would only complicate things further with the Covenant, as Mordin in the previous chapters is already beginning to clue into.

**Sierra B312** said, "_An interesting story this far, although I have to wonder how the wreckage of the UNSC Savannah could have possibly been transported with them._

_The attack on the Ardent Prayer, which was erroneously called a Covenant frigate in the first chapter, had to happen hundreds of kilometers away from the Long Night of Solace, if not then the Savannah could have easily been taken out by an energy projector from the Solace.  
Assuming that the wreckage remained in orbit and was propelled by the explosion towards the supercarrier, it still wouldn't cover the remaining distance between the point of destruction and the Solace. Even though, the engines were damaged, the Ardent Prayer could still move, and the Slipspace rupture only swallowed about a third of the Solace judging from the cutscene, which is about ten or so kilometers, it is doubtful that the Savannah would have been in the catchment area. Really, from what I can tell, the Savannah shouldn't be able to come along with them. I am genuinely interested in how this can be explained, are my assumptions wrong?"_

Honestly, for the purposes of this story, I'll assume the Savannah was in range of the slipspace rupture. The same way I assume the Rookie to be present in Ardent Prayer. I think it'll make for a better experience in the end, so this in itself is going to be a handwave.

Okay, that's it for review responses, thanks for all the positives words and the constructive critique, if you want to talk feel free to say hi in my PM box. I'm not ignoring your PMs if I didn't answer, but what you asked most likely would've been addressed in the story itself down the line so spoilers.

For all of my readers who have come from Manifest Destiny, well, uh, welcome back. If me blowing apart Chuka's hand and destroying the idea of the Special Task Force as a noble cause hasn't turned you off, you should be in familiar territory. Also really super familiar territory as I try to start to give the Normandy crew a little more character. But I'm sure you know Kay's old saying: The wrong place at the wrong time.

Also apologies for taking so long with this chapter, I may or might not have just replayed ME1.

As a writer it sucks to regurgitate, or rather, copy, dialog and paths straight from the derived material, but it's necessary however to an extent. I have to walk through these steps. When Shepard has the reins on the Normandy, expect something a little more smooth.

* * *

_ **Section 1-2** _

_ **Contact Harvest** _

* * *

Stowed away on that cargo ship, Tali'Zorah nar Rayya was at home. As a Quarian, she knew the Migrant Fleet was by no means able to comfortably provide the most living space for each Quarian that would've been seen as reasonably roomy. She, like every Quarian in existence, save for the small dozens who had split away and found a home on some planet in defiance of the Migrant Fleet's quest, grew up on the Migrant Fleet. She could deal with cramped.

She could deal with cramped when she was huddling data stolen from a Geth data core that implicated too much of the galactic peace for her to simply continue on her Pilgrimage all hunky dory.

On route to the Citadel, that was her plan.

That was until the damned Quarian software installed into all environmental suits rung its alerts:

She was glad she did hear it however, regardless of how much noise it made and why it caused a crew member a few lanes down to peek his head up and look in her general direction. She had been through a lot recently, as evidenced by the other Quarian with her.

"What the-?" Keenah'Breizh nar Honorata had seen the same alert flash onto his omni-tool. "It can't be."

"Hey! What are you two doing-!" A voice of a Turian crew member had been heard above them, looking down, alerted to their presence as stow aways.

Keenah had risen up as Tali sat, concentrated more on the alert. It had given her time to fully digest what was being transmitted from the Migrant fleet itself:

_ **/WIDE-BAND ALERT FOR ALL ON PILGRIMAGE/HIGH-PRIORITY/ALL QUARIANS WITHIN 3 RELAYS OF HUMAN COLONY "ALTIS" PLEASE MAKE CONTACT WITH QUARIAN COMM BUOYS ASAP FOR BRIEFING/THIS MESSAGE SHALL REPEAT FOR ONE HOUR** _

She wouldn't have answered anyway, her self-proclaimed mission was far more important than whatever the Migrant Fleet sent out, but still, it was rare that such a message was called. The only messages that were supposed to come along those channels were messages pertaining to the Homeworld itself, and she knew no new developments on Rannoch were had.

Still, Tali put it in the back of her head to consider, raising her hands up to the ceiling as the ship's guards had found her and her companion. The human colonies were going to become a very busy place, and perhaps Altis was to be one such point of interest.

There was no fear in her heart however as a gun was pointed at her. The Council needed to hear what Saren Arterius was going to do, and she could not afford to be late.

* * *

"The Arcturus Prime Relay is in range. Initiating transmissions sequence." Moreau's voice had again filled the air over the PA, but this time it was warranted, keeping the crew in check with the Normandy's flight path out of Sol.

The crew of the SSV Normandy was a crew mostly hand picked by Captain Anderson. From Shepard herself, to Doctor Chakwas in the medical-bay, and even the Marine security, the crew was specific in their roles and conditioning, and what it would mean to humanity was not to be understated. It was the "first" run of that new ship, with all the implications of its technology ready to show up the Galaxy at large.

In another timeline, universe, reality, or whatever alternative schema of history, it carried with it people who would change the course of galactic life forever, hardened and led by a woman who was all-so rightly named.

It was still true now, that woman emerging from the stairway, clad in her blackened, carbon armor.

"Commander." A Private Jenkins had nearly bumped into her as she, in her stride, arrived back in the CIC toward the cockpit.

She walked with an air of leadership, one whose very boot prints when left were sturdier, more lasting, than those of lesser men. She knew why she was here, knew what face to put on for first impressions of her crew.

She was Lieutenant Commander Shepard, Savior of Elysium, Butcher of Torfan, and yet, in the end, all that mattered to the men under her command was that she did her best, as much as she expected them to do their best.

"We are connected. Calculating transit mass and destination."

An older man, Navigator Pressly, had caught Shepard in the corner of his eye. He gave a knowing nod to her, and she gave one back. They knew each other before this, back on Elysium. Passing him and into the ship's forward stations the PA had cut out only to be replaced by the real voice of Moreau: next to him, a sight that was not usually had on a human ship.

Red and black. Grittier than her own color scheme, bowl and ovals and lights covering up a form that was still bipedal, but distinctly predatory. The back of the creature's head was seen: fringes swept back.

"The relay is hot. Acquiring approach vector."

She saw it now, out in the distance, past the windows of the Normandy as allotted to the cockpit: the spinning forks that were known as the Relays. The first time she had been through one she thought it an amazing experience, a privilege almost. Now they had lost their sheen and luster to her, but still the air about them and their mysteries glowed just like their blue auras.

It stared at them, head on, like a blue eye, a blue star, approaching.

Bypassing one last crew member, she finally found herself in step in the cockpit, the Turian that had also been in there revealed to her now. She hadn't seen him get on, but it was no matter. This ship had Turian blood in it.

As she planted herself, looking out and away toward the Relay however, he had made sure, as best she could without even looking at him, that her blood boiled hotter, her eyes cut sharper, and her heart beat truer than any else that would've come. She knew the air of Turian arrogance toward humans and she paid no mind to it. She didn't dismiss it. No. She bested it. In one of the cockpit stations Kaiden had been on duty, helping process the ship with Moreau, all steering that pale horse that had been the Normandy into history.

"Hitting the relay in three…two…" The Mass Effect fields of the Relay reached out toward them, engulfing them harmlessly as Moreau guided the ship along its bearing. All at once, in one heave and ho, the Normandy was taken. "One."

* * *

Shot across the stars.

Nothing more than just another commute in the long galactic perspective. Relay jumps were a daily thing, not to be underestimated of course.

The Turian, tribal like tattoos painted white over his face, finally shared a glance at Shepard, and she gave one back, holding it with him. It was an expectant look, and she gave an open one back.

The Normandy was deep in FTL as Moreau finally ran his final checks. "Thrusters… check. Navigation… check. Internal emissions sink engaged. All systems online. Drift… just under 1500 K."

Moreau seemed pleased, casually verifying it all, fingers dancing across his orange, holographic control panels.

"1500 is good. Your captain will be pleased." The vibrating drawl of the guest made note with a nod, stepping back away and out of the cockpit, off into the ship.

Moreau glanced over his shoulder, waiting till the Turian was out of ear-shot.

Flatly, "I hate that guy."

Shepard gave one amused huff.

"Nihlus gave you a compliment… so you hate him?" Kaiden posed the rational, obvious counter point.

Jeff "Joker" Moreau however, was the person to respond in such a way. He was more than good. He was the best damn pilot in the Alliance as far as he was concerned. "You remember to zip up your jumpsuit on the way out of the bathroom? That's good. I just jumped us halfway across the galaxy and hit a target the size of a pinhead. So that's incredible!" In a sense, it was true, but then again just being good at your job was by itself no means worthy of the praise he was seeking. "Besides, Spectres are trouble. I don't like having him on board. Call me paranoid."

Shepard would've done a double-take, especially since these two knew something she didn't, but she remembered Captain Anderson's words. She trusted him and whatever plan it was.

"You're paranoid. The Council helped fund this project. They have a right to send someone to keep an eye on their investment." Kaiden scoffed back. The man was always willing to go down the middle according to his dossier.

"Yeah, that is the official story. But only an idiot believes the official story."

Something which Shepard was very much inclined to agree with recently. "They don't send Spectres on shakedown runs."

Joker affirmed himself with a nod. "So there's more going on here than the captain's letting on. Besides, bad feelings are an occupational hazard, I know them well enough. We don't go anywhere unless there's a good reason, so what are we heading out to Eden Prime for?"

The Captain was right on time over the comms. "Joker. Status report."

It cut off the discussion as Joker thumbed over one status display: "Just cleared the Mass Relay, Captain. Stealth systems are engaged. Everything looks solid." He reported plainly.

"Good," Captain Anderson hardly sounded like he was giving a compliment. "Find a comm buoy and link us into the network. I want mission reports relayed back to Alliance brace before we reach Eden Prime."

"Aye, aye Captain." Joker thought it fair to report another thing: "Better brace yourself, sir. I think Nihlus is headed your way."

"He's already here, Lieutenant." Shepard could only break a small smirk in the corner of her mouth before her shoulder's squared upon hearing her name. It was an automatic response. Same was diving into cover, returning fire, or grinding back against a partner at the club.

"Tell Commander Shepard to meet me in the comm room for a debriefing."

Joker looked back at Shepard for a moment. "You get that, Commander?"

"I'm on my way." She nodded, beginning to walk away.

_"Pff. Is it me or does the captain always sound a little pissed off?"_

_"Only when he's talking to you Joker."_

The conversation she left went on without her, and it revealed a bit of the pilot for the Normandy that she couldn't gleam from the records. In short, he was a smart ass, but every crew had a place for one. Every family for that matter as well. Cynicism and sarcasm had its way to keep people sane, especially in something as macabre as the military, where one was obliged to drop fire on people and not write the word "fuck" on their armor out of politeness.

She used to revel in that type of person. She was once that type of person. Perhaps before she had been eighteen she would've considered Joker the epitome of cool, with enough crass opinions and motor mouth syndrome to meet her mettle, but war had changed her. She knew this. It was hard to be funny after standing before a field of dead soldiers whom were beholden to you and seeing your failures written in blood and bodies. Maybe it was because 30 was staring her in the face like the promise of a new chapter in life, or that, something was supposed to have happened that would've reset her world view, but for now, she fell into stoicness that she felt around her like the armor.

She was world weary and she had barely stepped into the galaxy. Hardly been outside human space.

"I'm telling you, I just saw him! He marched by like he was on a mission!" Navigator Pressly was a man who had reminded Shepard a bit too much of her father: career military, of course and a stereotypical example thereof. Ironic that she still ended up in the service regardless. Like any two-bit run-away from home, she had rebelled against parents that were either too busy or never there. She and her mother were on good speaking terms, but in the end, her father was simply her father, commanding some ship out along the colonies.

"He's a Spectre. They're always on a mission. Hell, I even heard that a Spectre showed up at Altis when this "Covenant" showed up few weeks ago." Chief Engineer Adams down by the Normandy's core had talked to Pressly over the ship's comms, the Navigator toying at the stations near the galaxy map of the Normandy.

It was one of the first she'd seen. Such elaborate displays usually not afforded to the Alliance ships Shepard as she knew it served on.

"And we're getting dragged along with him!"

"Relax, Pressly. You're going to give yourself an ulcer."

The line was dropped, left at that, as Shepard found her way to Pressly. He turned, promptly saluting. "Congratulations, Commander. Looks like we had a smooth run." He had paused, considering his words. Indeed the last dust off had been much rougher, much more… volatile in its nature. He saw those two humans again and given the same security briefing as everyone else who had seen them: Don't worry about it. "You heading down to see the captain?"

She nodded. "Yeah… Sounds like you have issues with our Turian guest."

Pressly shook his head. Shepard was prodding as usual, pinching. He had been under her conversations before. "Sorry, Commander. Just having a chat with Adams down in Engineering. Didn't mean to cause any trouble, but you have to admit-"

Shepard had cut him off. "Something's up?"

"Yeah," Pressly agreed. "Between two Special Warfare Operators and a Spectre, the entire crew is feeling it."

She was liable to see it his way. From his view as a crewman, not a commander. She remembered every day that the only thing she had over anyone was rank. She had walked the Earth and seen the salt of the ground. She knew better than to see herself as over them. "Trust me, I don't think we're getting the full picture Pressly, for anything."

The Navigator leaned against his console gently, briefly looking at the galaxy map: Destination Eden Prime. Only then had Shepard then confirmed their destination.

"Eden Prime?" She asked him again.

"Yeah. None of anything we're doing is making sense."

She agreed, puckering her mouth before giving herself a nod. "Be at ease Pressly."

"Hard to do so ma'am. I mean, just think about it: Captain Anderson doesn't need to be on deck for a shakedown run, and a full complement? Why bother?"

Shepard pointed one finger up at the ceiling vaguely, as if it was the entire ship. "Something could happen," she rationalized. "Never know when the fires start breaking out because of this skeleton drive."

Pressly could agree vaguely. "I guess. But still I can't help but feel we're primed for something else. Can you explain the Spectre? The Turian Hierarchy would've sent someone directly from Palaven, not someone underneath Council jurisdiction if they wanted oversight on this ship's run." Shepard had noticed his armor, a gun confidently on his hip. "Spectres don't come along to observe shakedown runs, and Nihlus looks like he's expecting some heavy action. I don't like it."

"Be at ease Pressly." That's all the Commander could say. "I'll try to find some answers when I talk to the Captain."

"Yes ma'am." He bowed out, back to his console as Shepard continued to walk around it, right into the throes of another heard conversation

"I grew up on Eden Prime, Doc. It's not the kind of place Spectres visit." Corporal Richard Jenkins. Eden Prime-born. A certainly jubilant individual. A rookie by any other name. "There's something Nihlus isn't telling us about the mission."

Doctor Chakwas had been sure to air her reluctance in accepting such skepticism. "That's crazy." She exasperated. "The captain's in charge here. He wouldn't take orders from a Spectre."

She was an older woman, Shepard could see. Her record betrayed her age however. She could've gone into a private practice anywhere, research anything she wanted comfortably. And yet, still, she joined the service. Her dossier was glowing with recommendation, Shepard remembered.

They both acknowledged her as she stood by their conversation.

"Not his choice, Doc. Spectres don't answer to anyone. They can do whatever they want. Kill anyone who gets in their way."

Shepard had twinged her lips for a moment. To be fair, most soldiers on the field operated on the same modus operandi. She knew she had.

"Ha!" Chakwas belted one chuckle. "You watch too many spy vids, Jenkins."

They both finally turned to Shepard. Jenkins went to render salute, but Shepard showed him her palm. There was no need. "What do you think, Commander? We won't be staying on Eden Prime too long, will we? I'm itching for some real action!"

Real action. She smirked inwardly. She looked for real action once. As a twenty-year-old, freshly minted lieutenant as a Marine in the Systems Alliance Navy. It eluded her then, until it found her on Elysium. War had changed her.

"I sincerely hope you're kidding, Corporal." Chakwas had known better as Shepard had. "Your real action usually ends with me patching up crew members in the infirmary."

"Every mission is just another mission, Corporal. You need to calm down." Her voice was stern, spoken like an officer. She was one.

He shrugged. "Sorry Commander, but the wait is just killing me. I've never been on a mission like this before! Not one with a Spectre on board!" As if anyone knew their current mission anyway. Though Jenkins had a guess.

"Going to let it get to your head?" Shepard teased.

Chakwas, if she were younger, might've been a good bar crawl partner the Commander would've deduced based on her follow up. "I think I might have something for that, if that's the case Jenkins."

Before he could've been wounded by the jesting, Shepard asked something, at least, mission pertinent: "You grew up on Eden Prime, Jenkins. What's it like?"

The man's gaze became very old, and yet very youthful at the same time: remembering his childhood. "It's very peaceful, Commander. They've been real careful about development so you don't have any city noise or pollution."

Shepard remembered the first time she saw the stars. When she ran away from home, from her nanny, as a teen. She ran away from Los Angeles across the ocean, into Asia, into Russia. In the wilderness of the Taiga, huddled underneath a tarp with a weak fire keeping her warm, she looked up and saw the stars for the first time in her life: just as God intended.

That alone was worth, well, the stars themselves.

"My parents lived on the outskirts of the colony. At night, I used to climb this big hill and stare across the fields back at the lights from the main settlement." He seemed wistful, but his energy radiated from his young face. "It was gorgeous. But when I got older, I realized it was a little too calm and quiet for me. That's why I joined the Alliance. Even paradise gets boring after a while."

"Why would a warship be going to paradise then?" Shepard had reiterated Pressly's concerns.

Jenkins shrugged. "Safe place. Good as any to have a shakedown run at. It's just that Spectre that's throwing everyone off, Commander. If it's a real mission, I just want it to start."

She had squinted one eye at him, warning Jenkins of his over-eagerness once again, she relented. "Captain's waiting for me."

"Goodbye, Commander." Chakwas bowed out with the Corporal.

The ready room was just around the corner, Marine guards posted, rendering salute. She saw their nametags: Black and Harris. They both rendered salute as she passed silently, offering her a view of the odd man out on the ship.

Man, in the broad sense of the word that is.

* * *

Turians were soldiers. Trained from birth into a society that had, in a sense, been like Rome. Many of the spoken names of the Turians had been, at least translated, followed along the line of what humanity had known as Rome. Whether this had been an intentional translation effort by the Turian software integrated into translation solutions or just a pure fluke, it had helped cement their image as warriors of the galaxy.

Here, standing in the ready room, was one of the deadliest of their flock. Nihlus.

He heard the door open, but he was unbothered, slowly turning to her after getting a view of the holographic screen up: it was a green planet, paradise as Jenkins described.

"Commander Shepard. I was hoping you'd get here first. It will give us the chance to talk." She rendered no salute to him, but it wasn't out of disrespect. It just didn't feel right as the flange of his speech came to pass her ears. The dissonance between the way his mouth moved and the sound that came out of it was noted, but translation software had been uber refined in those last few years that there was nothing to wonder about.

He was being inquisitive for a reason.

"The Captain said he'd meet me here." She said plainly, eyebrow raised toward the Turian.

Nihlus crossed his arms. "He's on his way." He reassured.

Pacing back in forth in front of her Shepard had faintly remembered her Drill Instructor. Looking her down, seeing what she was made of. "I'm interested in this world we're going to, Eden Prime. I've heard it's quite beautiful."

The idea of Eden or paradise to the Turians had surely been different, she reasoned, as was why he had asked.

"It's one of our most cherished planets, but I'm not a tourist. I did that once on duty I ended up in the middle of a mercenary slaver invasion."

Nihlus had given a small smile. "Fair enough, Commander."

"It's more than just a pretty picture though, Spectre." She was unsure on how to address him. "Is Spectre alright?"

He raised his three-fingered claws. "Nihlus is fine, Commander Shepard… and how do you mean?"

She nodded in response, pursing her lips before answering carefully. "I traveled on Earth for a long time before I became a soldier, Nihlus, and I see a lot of Earth in Eden Prime. I can't be the only one who must think that."

"A perfect little world on the edge of your territory?"

Again, a small nod. "It's something worth protecting."

"And you will be that protector?" Nihlus walked back to that screen, his back to Shepard.

Her aggravation that sprouted up in that moment hadn't been that of a human versus a Turian. No it had just been the fact everything felt like there was a layer she had not been privy too yet. She would just outright ask. "Is something up, Nihlus?

He turned back around. "Your people are still newcomers to the galaxy, Shepard. The galaxy is a very dangerous place, and I'm sure you understand that, I don't mean to imply otherwise." He said placatingly.

"I'm not young, Nihlus." There was a little wist in her voice. "I've lived a life."

"I know." He understood. "I've seen your file."

"What?"

Why would a Turian be privy to her dossier?

The doors opened behind them before she could ask, and in had come the Captain.

There was not a grim look on his face, but rather, that of wariness. He said the right words to keep Shepard complacent, then and there. "I think it's about time we tell the Commander what's really going on."

"This mission is far more than a simple shakedown run, Shepard."

Caught between her captain and a Spectre, she was right to throw glances both of their ways. "I figured there was something that wasn't being told to me." The entire damn crew figured it. "Does it have anything to do about Chief Gul and Chief Dur-"

Anderson seemed stressed at the moment the Chiefs came into play, raising his hand. Nihlus cocked his head. He had been given a crew manifest of the Normandy and he didn't recognize those names. "No Shepard." He said once. "This shakedown run is a cover for us."

"Because?"

Anderson tried to avoid Nihlus's trying gaze, his mandibles twitching inquisitively, hoping the Spectre didn't catch what had been said. "We're making a covert pick-up on Eden Prime. That's why our stealth systems are running."

The Normandy's stealth systems, as briefed to her, hadn't been exactly cloaking or pure stealth. Anyone looking out a window would've seen her. Though windows had been out of style, and the Normandy's ability to suck up any of its heat emissions into internal sinks, waiting to be discarded at a more opportune time, had been more or less gifted it with invisibility. It meant that, even in human space, the Normandy was a ghost.

"There a reason you kept me in the dark, sir?" She asked.

He nodded. "This comes down from Prime Minister Shastri himself. Information strictly on a need-to-know basis, and now you need to know." He looked to what Nihlus was looking at: the screen of Eden Prime. A closer look had revealed something more to Shepard: ruins. Ruins that had only been seen once before. "A research team unearthed some kind of beacon during an excavation… It was Prothean."

Her eyes tracked the captain as he came to step besides Nihlus. "They might've disappeared 50,000 years ago," Nihlus started, with reverence. "But their legacy remains. The Mass Relays, the Citadel, our ship drives… all of it, based on Prothean technology, _reclaimed_ by us."

Anderson nodded in agreement. "The last time this happened, Shepard-"

"It was big." She stepped out of line, knowing full well what it was. "It jumped us ahead two centuries didn't it?"

Anderson sucked in the spit through his teeth gravely, in agreement. "We don't have the capabilities to handle something like this. Our research and science departments are already tied up with the cooperation with the Covenant on Altis, and even if we hadn't been we would've needed outside assistance. The Citadel and the Council Races are the only ones able to fully, properly, study this."

"It's wise that your captain views this as going beyond your species, Commander." Nihlus said simply, head tilted down into the cusp of his armor. "Prothean ruins and caches are hardly ever found, and the discovery of one would be something, hopefully, that the entire Galaxy can benefit from… even this new, Covenant, that has appeared in your space."

Shepard had drew herself in for a moment, considering, thinking, before looking back to the Spectre. "Would the Council really share something as impactful as this with a new coalition of aliens that just blipped into existence days ago?"

Nihlus had, probably, chuckled to himself. "I am generally speaking, Commander. While matters of the Protheans are something surely the Council are interested in, and don't misunderstand me, we too are also interested in the Covenant, but in the end according to your Ambassador the Covenant is an internal affair." The Turian didn't seem quite to believe himself, but he trusted the situation. Last he had heard from the wire his mentor had been there: Saren Arterius. "How you disseminate their arrival with implications that arise from this, is a Human matter, as long as their rights are fully respected as any species is expected to have and regard to."

Anderson had stroked his chin. He had heard enough of the Covenant in those last few days, and how strange that this mission, seemingly the most important of all of human history, had been almost pushed asides by something else. "Enough politics, Nihlus."

He rose one hand. He had one more point. "You humans don't have the best reputation." Shepard had fought Turians before. Mercs, of course, not representing the Hegemony, though she knew the predatorial flanging of a Turian all too well: in their eyes, their teeth, the way their talons moved. Nihlus wasn't threatening her: just reminding her of what he had been. "Some species see you as selfish. Too unpredictable. Too independent. Dangerous, even. But I have reason to see it differently, Commander Shepard."

He stepped toward her, and she breathed in silently, staring at the Turian dead on, a foot taller than her. He moved slowly, just barely out of a range that would've been considered impolite to be in. Chest to chest.

"Nihlus wants to see you in action, Commander. He wants to evaluate you."

Shepard broke her composure. "What?"

Nihlus didn't size her up. No. He stepped behind her, supporting her.

"What do you mean, Captain?"

Anderson had, if he admitted to himself, not been the best judge of character and soldiers, grasping at non-objective ideas, abstractions, that definitely went against the judgement of Hackett and Udina. He always seemed to pick them right.

As was why that Spartan was here. Why the Shock Trooper was.

As was why Commander Shepard too had been here.

"The Alliance has been pushing for this for a long time." Anderson put weight into his words, offering a hand almost to Shepard as if trying to visualize it. "Humanity wants a larger role in this galaxy, with the Council, shaping Interstellar Policy as we expand."

"And that means-" It hit her like a gunshot, stopping her words. She looked at Nihlus in a new light.

Anderson continued. "The Spectres represent the Council's power and authority. If they accept a human into their ranks, it shows how far the Alliance has come."

"It also shows far you've come, Commander." His flange dropped low, looking at her, a Kubrick stare. "Do you know who else would be able to take up the mantle of Spectre?"

"Captain Anderson, sir. Commander Ryder. Hell, even Grissom himself-"

Nihlus stopped her. "There's a reason we chose you Commander, but we cannot tell you. All you should know is that I put your name forward."

Shepard spoke with surprise on her face. "You did?"

He nodded once, and, for a moment, Anderson flinched in pain, but he agreed with Nihlus. "Earth needs this, Shepard. We're counting on you."

"I need to see you in action for myself. Eden Prime will be the first of many missions together."

The rest of her life had been put before her: service to the Council, to the Galaxy, in the name of Earth and the Alliance. She didn't know what to feel really. She didn't feel anything. Just a future that seemed… heavy.

"You'll be in charge of the ground team. Secure the beacon and secure it back to the ship. Nihlus will act in observation."

She was a soldier, in the end now. She was to follow orders. "Just give the word, Captain."

"We should be getting close to Eden Prime-"

"Captain! We've got a problem!" Joker's voice rang through the comms to that room.

There was something that they needed to see, and see it they did when the Captain asked for it to be sent to the ready room.

* * *

We all know the story, what it is, what it was, and what it will be.

What was seen in that message, that distress call, was something that could've only happened on that mission, on that day, and on that ship. A darkness from beyond the stars: an attack on Eden itself. The first battle in that War in Heaven, beamed directly to the Normandy.

In several hundred thousand years' time, when they would speak of the Shepard and her Demons, they would always start the story here: three men looking at an image, over half a minute in.

A beast, clad in black. A harbinger for the times to come made into the image of leviathans. A shape seen only in nightmares, spoken in horror stories.

It came to destroy, and it destroyed, the despair in faces of those in that transmission read before their destruction.

"Status report?"

"Seventeen minutes out, Captain. No other Alliance ships in the area." Joker responded back to the Captain. The situation even layering his usual snark.

"Take us in, Joker, fast and quiet. This mission just got a lot more complicated."

They had a mission, regardless of the circumstances. "A small strike team can move quickly without drawing attention. It's our best chance to secure the beacon."

Shepard hadn't cared at that moment. "There's a colony there. We need to provide support, especially if comms are cut."

Anderson had seen Shepard's pain, her drive, but- "This is bigger than Eden Prime, Shepard. Survivors are secondary here."

"Bullshit."

"Shepard." Anderson sterned, but his XO didn't back down. This wasn't the time or place. "Either way you're going in, and we'll mobilize the rest of the contingent."

There was a hint of bitterness in Shepard, come and past in that second. Anderson would've said to keep herself under control, to know what was at stake and it reflected poorly upon her, but, in the back of his head, Nihlus couldn't help but feel… impressed.

Idealism often died with age and experience, but when kept, it saved more people than it killed. Spectres operated on the pleasure of the Council. Whether that meant they were saving people or not, it was no factor. Still, most Spectres who were still sane kept themselves hoping their actions would save people.

Nihlus would not hold her in judgement for this.

"Aye sir." She did reel herself back in, just the slightest.

"I'll meet you down there in the bay in just a second."

She saluted him down as she left, not even paying heed to Nihlus. A storm brewed in her wake: air sucked from Nihlus's lungs as he saw Shepard's stride. This wasn't his only exposure to her. He'd been a bad special agent if he had been. Reconnaissance was in the job description. He'd seen her in battle from video footage, seen stills of her in public, on leave. She burned brightly, the hottest fires within her as she fought, the skill she used to fan it nearly incomprehensible. On the other hand: she was kind, she was empathetic, she would give her life in the name of a stranger.

"I observed her once. Drained her entire damned wallet and then her Summer in order to get a horse farm in… Asia, I think, back into shape." Nihlus mused as the door closed behind her. Anderson looked at him expectantly, to explain. He did. "They shared one conversation. An old, old human male with old, creaky bones, at a farmer's market. She dropped everything she was doing and helped him fix his farm from scratch."

Nihlus's mandibles moved, seemingly, on their own as he stared blankly at that door she had gone through.

"Are there Spectres like that?"

Not him. Not Saren Arterius. Not Avitus Rix. Not Tela Vasir. Not even the first: Beelo Gurji.

He couldn't answer Anderson's question. There had never been a human spectre before. There hadn't been a Spectre before who, after so many years, remained in touch with simpler times. With someone who they were proud to be.

He remembered how young he used to be. How black and white the galaxy was. He remembered how proud his family was of him. For Nihlus, that seemed like another life. "Not after the Council is done with you."

Nihlus was wrong though, stepping with the Captain to join the rest of the ground team in the bay.

The Council's dirty work, the proxy and cold wars throughout the borders and the stars, criminals and evils that came with the galactic civilizations naturally. They were, of course, a part of the reason why Nihlus could not ever go home again (why he wouldn't be able to go home again, soon enough even). No. What had made people like him, who humanity had wished Shepard to be, was the Galaxy itself: history upon history all being funneled down and forced to be sifted through by them, the Spectres.

The weight of the galaxy itself on their shoulders, people like him forced to make decisions. Mass effects.

No one person had the right, or the ability, to make such a choice. The Genophage was one such decision made by the Council, overseen by the Spectres, and now the galaxy had paid for it all.

What would happen on Eden Prime, who would be on Eden Prime, the galaxy would bear witness to its ripples for all time.

* * *

"What's your proficiency with Visual Signage?" Mai spoke, standing, awaiting orders. JD tilted his head up at her from his leaning sit against his locker. He kept his head tilted at her. "Hand signals. Things like that?"

JD laid his hand flat, shaking it a bit. He was joking with her a tad, but she hadn't known. "Yes or no?" She pressed on. He sighed, standing up, adjusting the sling that he had attached to his SMG. The requisitions officer had given him an odd look when both he and Mai had kept their guns deployed and activated, instead keeping them ready and hung off their forms like the soldiers of the last century, but they let it fly.

"Proficient." He said once, flashing a few of the more obscure hand signals her way: On the Deck, Bound and Cover, Peel off one at a Time. He liked speaking like this, with his hands.

She nodded at him once. "Did we ever check that Alliance hand signage is the same?" She hushed her voice. There hadn't been a comm channel set up for them, between their helmets only, so she had only kept on speaking out in the air. It was no matter, no one was in ear shot and the other Marines onboard were occupied with themselves, only, occasionally, shooting a glance their way.

JD shook his head. "From what I saw on Altis, and then the Montenegro, it seemed the same." He deftly remembered. But with that, he remembered something else. "What's the language of Spartans?"

From time to time, Mai wondered what it would've been like for her to be face to face with a Spartan-II and confront them with herself: to see someone else knowing what it meant to drag fingers across visors, the minute and subtle rocking of a head back and forth to denote danger. She acted as support for some Spartan-II missions. Never directly identifying herself, but nonetheless providing sniper, covert, or recon support. Perhaps that was why she had been able to be who she was: she saw the best in action, and in turn she had become the best herself.

In the end she would always be a copy of them, but it was nice to have hands-on time with the originals.

"Spartan Signs." She said once, bringing two fingers up to her helmet. "I don't know much. But I know enough it could be helpful, maybe."

Lucy, B091, she had heard of what had happened to her following what was Beta Company's suicide mission. How she had become mentally unable to speak and instead opted to speak only in shorthand communications to a small pool of people, one of them being Tom-B292. Mai wouldn't know if, if she had been allowed, to reach out to Lucy and Tom. To let them know that more survived their class. However, her very existence was classified, and even the Spartan-IIIs were subject to the veil of ONI.

"You did one, once." Mai spoke. JD had raised an eyebrow behind his visor. "Usually the only people who have physical contact with us are either Covenant we're about to kill, or , well- Other Spartans."

Gingerly, she reached out a hand, touching upon the ODST's shoulder pauldron. "This means relief, to be relieved." It meant that you were going to be okay: a reassurance. Mai wouldn't have known that, by itself, it was simply understood. JD let her go on though, nodding. She rose one finger up after her touch lingered. A flick almost. "This means private comms."

JD looked down at his own finger, mimicking the deliberate flick up into the air toward his ear. "Can we use that if we want to talk privately?" He asked.

She nodded softly. "Do you know how to use your HUD light signals with the team uplink?" JD shook his head no. "Okay then. I'll teach you. Teach you soon."

She was going to turn away, let him be, but he had a question right then and there as he realized something. "How do you know all this if you were a lone wolf?"

It was a question that caught her off guard: his quiet voice speaking loudly in her mind. A fair question, she supposed. "Just in case."

"Just in case?"

Noble Team was her first time operating in a team. For her to be left behind because she did not abide by standard Spartan procedure and secrets, she wouldn't allow that. Not in the name of the mission. Nothing could hold her back.

Something seemed to be bothering him she noticed, holding his hands within each other, through gloves. His entire form was covered, much like her: his ODST BDU giving him some EVA and extraterrestrial survival capabilities, but because of that she almost saw his moves better, the ruffle of leather and synthetic material having their foley. It was if there was something on the tip of his tongue.

She raised both her hands, palms up, the smallest of shrugs, coaxing him out as he let his hands fall to his side.

"There is… something else that might help us." He hadn't done this for a long time. Not ever since he had left Luna. Not ever since he buried Mom. He rose his right hand to his chest, fingers out and tight, before laying across his armor over his heart before both his hands closed, only to extend their index and middle fingers, tapping them both together. The left hand went away, right hand back up. Shapes, going by in fast succession, all down by fingers and movements.

Mai tilted her head. It was as if she was learning the Spartan language again: of hands and actions.

In the 24th century a very small fraction of a fraction of people were ever afflicted by what had come over JD's Mother, however there still existed a way for them to communicate fully, wholly, and without fault given all parties knew it. His lips moved behind his helmet, automatically, by habit. His silence was perhaps because of this growing up, but he didn't regret a damn thing. It was for his Mother.

_My name J-O-N-J-A-M-E-S._

He brought his hand to his chest again, palm up, and then jerked up and then out, as if a question made in a gesture.

Mai didn't respond. He would've been surprised if she did.

"It's a civilian sector language." He finally explained. "One my mother had to use."

"Had to?"

_"My Mother was deaf."_

JD was **signing**.

Mai had paused behind her helmet, her mouth barely open, unsure of what to say. She had asked him of a language without words, and she had now realized that he would have no problems with it. His ability to speak a language like that came not from tactical necessity, it came from family. That was where he drew, once, his strength from.

"If you-" JD caught himself putting his fist into his hands toward his chests, the hand that was being held having a thumb up, only to gently push it out back toward her. He was continuing to sign. "If I help you. Will you help me?"

She nodded once, that's when Shepard came yelling.

She came as a fire did, hot and heavy, ready and willing, her own fists curled as she came out of that elevator and everyone stood at attention. "Gear up. Combat loads! We've got hostiles!"

"Combat loads?" There was a ring leader to the Marines that hadn't been Lieutenant Alenko, the man himself tailing in after Shepard. "The hell do you mean?"

"Can it Emerson." Alenko had pointed a finger at the man. "You know how these things go."

Emerson had shook his head, the man obviously tired. "What's our motto _**Hitman**_?" He spoke to the Marines around him.

"Wrong Place, Wrong Time!" They all roared back.

"Hooah."

"You know these Marines?" Shepard had asked, opening her omni-tool as she checked her weapons and kinetic barrier status. Behind her the other regular Marines who had been on the upper decks emerged from the elevator, gearing up. Anderson was to be down shortly.

Alenko had seemed passive. "Only introduced to them last week. They're some Marine Raiders that got tasked in lieu of the regular contingent. Another N7 made the recommendation, I hear."

Another? Shepard turned to him, her helmet in her palms, held, an eyebrow raised. "Got a 20 on who?"

"Commander Ryder I think. These are his men, back from the SSV Tesla." She had been trained by him. A fact that she had felt calming to herself in that coming clear before the storm. To her, it seemed like her old mentor had sent a bonus her way, to keep in touch, to keep her capable with the right men and women behind her.

Mai had twitched her head in their direction, hearing the name of Ryder, hearing who those Marines were.

She was used to the cover: having ONI spooks over her shoulders always, and she would've only expected the same here now. Ryder personally being able to keep touch however, it was… disconcerting.

Emerson, JD had recognized his accent as he shot a look at Shepard, getting his rifle out of the weapon locker. It was that of Luna. Or rather, his Luna. New York-origin. "Commander!"

"Yes?"

"What's our deployment? We feet wet?"

She shook her head. "We going green, Marine." She shot off a information packet on her omni-tool, all the ground team designated feeling their own buzz. It was details of the planet, and, oddly, to some, it was also their known destination.

It rung on JD's and Mai's as well as they finally closed the distance between their corner of the bay and the rest of the ground team. They would've fully joined them had it not been the distraction that came from their wrist: knowing of Eden Prime.

The Systems Alliance strayed away from scientific designations of the stars as standard. Names like Utopia, Paradiso, Horizon and names like them had dominated human owned systems. It would've been impossible for Mai and JD to think of the stars differently from how they did, but because of that, when they saw the Exodus Cluster and the Utopia System, they didn't read those words. Not as a image of their intended planet came up and another name appeared in their heads, stopping them.

Coincidences were guaranteed, now that they were still in a Milky Way, and they wondered if the Covenant knew this now too.

"This planet." That was all Mai needed to say as JD remembered. He remembered thirty years ago… This was like a time capsule. An impossible image.

A planet of blue and green. Lush, a paradise. How rare it felt to Mai and JD. To see planets that had still been green and blue despite the Covenant felt impossible, for the glassing did away with that. There, however, was something more to their feeling, something that betrayed their logic as if it was an answer reaching out to them. Both of them. It stared at them like the giant planet that had been holographically telegraphed where the galaxy map was. Looking down the cockpit, out the window, that same planet was rapidly being approached by the Normandy.

It was an obscene thought, then an abstract thought, then an impossible one.

Every UNSC service member had remembered this planet by heart. It was where the war started. When the Covenant first emerged from the void and in one fell swoop crushed any defense forces in orbit and on planet, transmitting this one message burned into the stars and the corpses of every human died that day:

_ **"Your destruction is the will of the gods, and we are their instrument."** _

A missing captain on Feburary 4th, 2531 had said it best when that planet was reclaimed from the alien foe:

_"Five years. Five long years. That's how long it took to take _ _ **Harvest ** _ _back."_

History had a way of repeating, even across galaxies, universes, stories, and it was an ironic mistress that teased and payed homage. It put a planet in front of two humans out of their own history and made them remember where it had been made and began. Thirty years ago, the Human-Covenant War began in another universe. Now another would start again on a familiar stage, the realization heavy. The heavy slam of JD stumbling in his steps as he took that information in was of a cold sweat. As for Mai? Her mouth was agape.

Eden Prime, as known to the UNSC, as known to Jon-James Durante and Mai, was _**Harvest**_.

* * *

"School circle." Kaiden had yelled out, and so it had happened. This was the first time Mai had gotten a good look at the Marines on the Normandy: A darker man, claw marks on his cheek had been the one of rank below Lieutenant Alenko. That was Emerson, NCO probably. With him had been a diverse assortment: a woman with olive skin with a purple scarf around her neck, a pale, bald man who had seemed to shine in that dark bay, a great bearded man with what looked like a grenade launcher hung around his back… the list went on, over a dozen men and women, but they all seemed to be of the warfighting sort.

The shock of knowing where they were going could not be held by them long as they abided by Kaiden's orders.

She stood, JD crossing his arms besides her, just outside that school circle as the rest took a knee or stood with them. Shepard had appeared again, a sullen look on her face. "We've got mission orders."

Jenkin's face sunk. "What?"

"Eden Prime is under attack." Shepard said fast, hard, Jenkin's eyes sinking into his head and mouth agape. His homeworld was under attack.

It was a face that JD and Mai had seen a thousand times over. It was a face that Mai had seen written on a Spartan's. Jorge knew his home. It was Reach. He wanted, of all things, to die for it, and she privately thought that maybe she did deny him his destiny in doing that. Though she stood by what she said to him: He was too expensive to die, and she was ready to go.

"By who?" Jenkins had been trying to still form the idea in his mind. "Pirates?"

Shepard hesitated on answering. "We have no comms or intel on the ground, but from what we can tell it's not a pirate or mercenary faction. Early warning grid would've been able to pick them up."

Did the Alliance know what it was like to lose an entire world? Sure, Elysium might've given them a taste, but did they know the true insanity of losing millions, billions, per day? It had taken the UNSC years to get used to it, but here, today, Jenkins had been cursed with the knowledge of that feeling. It made his blood boil.

"We need to get there. Now." There was steel in his jaw and bite on his words.

Shepard had felt the cold hit her as Jenkins said that. It was his home. "We will, Corporal. We will."

Déjà vu. JD had heard this too many times: so many ODSTs had gone on missions that had been too personal. Many of his last squad had come from Reach, and they carried that rage within them. Home was home, and here they were, a man and a woman with no place to call home.

"Captain on deck!" One of the Marines who had been facing the elevator had cried out. It was Anderson, a war path toward them tracked.

Everyone rendered salute and stood rigid straight, but the Captain had no time for such pleasantries, just standing barely outside the circle.

"You have the floor Commander. I think you know what we have to do."

Thrown on with responsibility. She knew the dance, reluctance as she was to always take more on. "Aye sir."

It was if she was a coach and this was the last five yards of the football game, her team over her as she crouched, using her omni-tool to plan the order of battle. If Mai and JD, if anyone for that matter, had any doubt in her effective, applied leadership, it was disproven now as she comfortably fell into it.

"This isn't how I wanted to do icebreakers," she started, trying to ease people into a combat situation. "But I need to know who I got here."

Alenko had started but Shepard shook her head. "I want to hear it from the NCOs down, Kaiden."

Emerson seemed surprised. "Marine Raiders, ma'am. SOF-Capable. Not like you, but I like to think store brand is pretty good."

"You any good at handling SAR?"

"On occasion." A woman to Emerson's side spoke up. She had an accent. Not British, close though. South African perhaps. JD knew the type when they came up from the New Mombassa Space Elevator.

"You one element?" Shepard continued.

"Yes ma'am." They all answered back.

"Okay we'll keep it that way." She shot a glance specifically at people. Kaiden. Jenkins. Mai and JD. "You guys are my fireteam."

Mai nodded, subtly. Again, forced to work with people. She didn't have a choice.

JD had grown anxious at that. He had been through this process a hundred times, and each time, his squad had ended up dead. Was he a curse? Or was he just unlucky? Each time it was tested he had wanted to die anyway.

"What's your ident Emerson? Sergeant? Right?"

He nodded. "Hitman."

"Okay." She pulled up a map of the AO and people started synchronizing displays with Shepard's omni-tool. "We have two taskings. One has an Op Sec that is probably out of your pay grade-"

"Relating to the Turian?" The accented woman again spoke, thumbing to Nihlus by the weapons lockers. He had been observing Shepard and only slightly bothered by a human calling him out. He was used to it.

"Can't confirm or deny." The woman tightened her jaw, letting Shepard continued. "That objective is on a need to know, so my Fireteam will be briefed separately on that. The other tasking is this: We have little to no intel on the ground but we can assume the colony is under attack. Go in, link up with Colonial Defense militias, and make whoever is out here start pushing daisies, can I get an affirm on that?"

"Oorah." The Marines responded back.

Shepard nodded, pleased. "We'll have two Fireteams on the ground. From here on out I am designating all deployed infantry assets from the Normandy as Hitman."

Mai had blinked once or twice. During a few ops in her time as a Spartan, she had been given that codename. It fit her, however. It did not belie her purpose: Noble, Majestic, Eagle, Lancer, and so on and so forth, all surgical and lofty names that, perhaps, were not indicative of her brutality. Hitman was right. It was who she was.

"I'll Ident as Hitman Actual for the duration of this operation, hooah?"

"Hooah." Emerson had adjusted his beret, leading the one word chant up and down in recognition of Shepard.

"I'll be leading Hitman 1 Section. Emerson, you're tasked with Hitman 2 Section. You're AO is in defense of the colony and linking up with any defense authorities."

The darker man nodded, looking around his men, all of them sharing his gaze with him, and then back to her. Corporal Loke had ran her gloved hand on her chin. "We have any fire support from the Normandy?"

JD would've asked the same if he were up to ask. Normally he would've relied on another ODST to speak for him, they often thought alike, but it was needed now. Better up armored than under gunned.

Shepard nodded, thumbing back to the IFV in that bay. "You have the Mako. Hitman 1 Section is dropping in bodies only." The Commander turned her gaze back on her fireteam. Kaiden had bucked up, tightening his teet and jaw. For JD and Mai however, it was business as usual. The surrealness of being thrown back into battle already, it betrayed what new start they had now. The enemy was unknown for once: not the Covenant.

"What's the Turian's tasking?" Mai had said straightly, even with Nihlus in that school circle. The Spectre shot her a look, but made no comment.

"Nihlus has his own directive, and we're acting in support."

He nodded, running his talons over the shotgun on his hip. "I move faster on my own."

Mai could understand that, though she didn't know how she felt about another element running on his own directives in the field. "Do we have an ID on hostiles?"

"Unknown." Shepard responded.

To not know who was attacking, it was odd. The image of that squid like mechanical abomination stuck in her head. It wasn't anything she had ever seen. Perhaps Geth. Perhaps another Batarian ploy or trick. She couldn't give an answer.

"Estimates on their firepower? Capaibilities?" Mai had promptly asked. Her voice had just a hint of filter behind it now.

"Unknown. All we know all comms in and out are dead."

JD and Mai tilted their helmet clad heads at Anderson. Was this a test?

He shook his head silently. No. This was real and they were needed on deck.

"Hitman 2." Shepard started again, said Marines poking their head up. "Act as QRF, standard procedure if this was in response to an attack on the colonies. Play it by ear when you're on the ground though, comm black out."

Emerson tipped his head at Shepard. "How about these two? The Navy spooks."

"They ain't spooks." Shepard had spoken for them. "…Let's just say they're a little like the Normandy." New. Untested. With Shepard at the helm.

"They with you?" Emerson spoke to Shepard, but only bore his look at the armored monster that was Mai. He was worried for his new XO, rightly. What Marine wouldn't be?

Mai balled fists from her hands, and, in her crouch, Shepard saw it.

"Yeah." Shepard said fast, wary, but placating. "They got my back."

Anderson had been quick to keep it moving, flashing his own omni-tool. "Joker. I'm setting coordinates for three DZs. Can you hit them?"

"Who do you think I am Captain? ETA Five minutes."

Shepard had again been reminded of their Turian guest. "Nihlus! You hear our plan?" She cried out.

"Of course Commander. I'll try to keep up." It was a little mocking, but Shepard dealt with it as she threw her hand up, two fingers out and around finally settling on the Mako.

"Hitman 2. Mount up."

"Aye Commander!" They all yelled out.

In her feet Mai felt the Normandy break atmosphere, the pit in JD's stomach returning: one he felt when he was falling too slowly through the clouds. "Open the bay!" Shepard yelled out. That was when the Mako had roared to life, taking center of the bay, ready for launch. Air began to be sucked out, Shepard's red hair fluttering as Eden Prime below was seen.

Acting like this, the Normandy was a giant troop transport, so JD and Mai knew the play as they lined up against the walls and held on. Shepard however, she stood dead center, her form silhouetted against red sky for but a moment before joining the special operators.

"Approaching landing point one!"

Jenkins had stepped out of line and went to the lip of the bay, peering down, seeing a sight that had become too common in a war that two of his fireteam had come from:

A colony on fire. Buildings burning. Dead in the street.

This was his home, and he damned Shepard for making him go with her. Though she was right in that decision. He would've been too distracted. JD was impressed that Shepard knew this, or, at least, he assumed he accounted for this.

"Jenkins. On me." Kaiden had stacked behind Shepard, yelling out to him to reel himself. He did, reluctantly. When he returned Kaiden had put both his hands on the man's shoulders. "Come on Rich, you with me?"

He seemed distant: that one fast image, burned into his mind. "I saw people- people, dead in the street."

"Keep your head straight soldier. We don't want you joining them." Shepard said. She had never wanted to reconcile soldiers like this: in the middle of battle, but there was nothing she could do but do that.

Nothing got more people killed like emotional soldiers.

It's why Mai had been so effective, and why JD been so reserved, so silent.

It was a different world now. The ODST tried to reach out a hand, but Mai's hand had found JD's shoulder first. He looked back to a unpolarized visor, her face hidden, but he felt like he could read it as she let her hand fall from his shoulder.

Wasn't the time or place to make connections.

He disagreed. He disagreed deep in his gut, his heart, though, in the end, she was his superior.

Jenkins calmed down enough for Kaiden to have his hands leave his shoulders, going to the bay door, laying on his stomach just short of the drop. They were approaching the first drop point: in the colony itself.

"Outbound personnel stand up!" Kaiden had peered over the bay of the doors, the red sky of Eden Prime burning through their vision as below: hints of a battle, burning machinery and battlefields. "Load!"

Emerson had led his men into the back of the Mako as Shepard's fireteam had taken a knee to the sides of the bay. All but Mai however. She alone had the strength, the weight, to not feel the shift of the Normandy and fear falling out the back.

The magnetized boots also helped.

The turret of the Mako swiveled as men came in, wheels on their axis turning left or right. JD, deftly, remembered several experimental drops where vehicles were often included. They didn't much survive in one piece, which had made him wonder how he as flesh and blood had been able to. One of those things he hadn't spent much time dwelling on.

"Ten seconds to drop point one!" Joker's voice rang on the comms.

Ten seconds felt like a year and, distantly, JD remembered his first drop. He remembered the signaling beeps of the drop pods ready to be let loose from their dock and hurtling down toward the ground. At the height the Normandy was skirting, it was hardly a drop, but to the Alliance Marines, it was new.

The lights near the bay door went green, and the Mako roared to life, dropping out of the ship and down toward the ground, disappearing from view as comms went alight moments later. The bated breath between drop, dropping, and hitting the ground was familiar to some, but no less tense. "Hitman 2 section has hit ground. Assuming radio black out until advised. Hitman 2 out."

Shepard held her ear piece. "Copy all." She turned over to the rest of her men. "Get ready!"

They had all replaced the first fireteam to go out, standing in line, all behind Shepard.

Anderson had peered himself over the lip at the planet below. He had missed his time, leading troops on the front on away missions, but times had changed. He hadn't been the one being vetted for Spectre training anymore. He turned back around to the group. "Your team's the muscle in this operation, Commander!" She tipped her head at him, acknowledging. "Go in heavy and straight at the dig site!"

"Approaching drop point two!"

Nihlus's stop. He had his shotgun out. "I'll keep in contact. Remember the objective Shepard." It was a warning and dare all in one, and before Shepard could respond, he dropped out the moment the Normandy had tried to hover.

She pressed on her helmet in response.

"Nihlus will scout out ahead. He'll feed you his status, but any other communique with any of the Normandy's ground team will be off limits. You copy?" Anderson had spoke for the Turian now: for the objective.

"Hooah." Shepard could only meekly respond.

Mai was basically vibrating along with Jenkins. For different reasons of course. She was not used to this kind of unknown. She didn't even know her objectives. To ask was to demean her. She was too used to just knowing to ask.

He did. "What's our objective Shepard?"

The entire fireteam turned to JD, and then to Shepard. "Highly sensitive material collection. A beacon of sorts. We secure that, and then we can assist the colony."

"Approaching drop point three!"

"Is that the Turian's tasking too?" Mai spoke out of wanting to know what an alien was doing.

"We've got his back, Chief Gul." She declared to answer.

New. New. This was all new. Helping aliens.

"On your go!" Joker had yelled over the comms, the Normandy going into a hover.

"The mission's yours now, Commander! Good luck!"

Shepard nodded fiercely before pointing back to JD, a smirk in her face. "You're the shock trooper JD. On point."

Activating guns wasn't exactly something he was used to, but JD did as he shouldered his SMG, running up to the lip of the bay.

It was a hell of a drop. At least a building tall. Several stories between him and the start of a new mission, a new war. He had long gotten over cold feet, but this, now, he had to reflect as he looked down.

He could count the amount of times he had been deployed on a Pelican, or any drop ship at all, by hand. If it hadn't been his drop pod, it had been fast rappelling from Hornets or Falcons. Though how ironic now, in the service of a different humanity, he felt like he was doing the same thing.

Mai saw JD, on the lip of the bay looking down. He needed not to lose a game of rock-paper-scissors to be prompted to go forward: this was how he was trained. Feet first into Hell, and in no other way.

* * *

Just like the ODSTs from campaigns past, in another world, in another time, onboard the Spirit of Fire during its campaign to retake that planet in another universe, Master Chief Petty Officer Jonathon-Jameson Durante followed in their footsteps and dropped with his own two feet onto the dirt of Harvest.

The familiar shock that went through his legs. It would've crumpled lesser men, but he had been long used to it as he coiled like a spring and then sprung out.

JD snapped around as he hit ground, SMG up and scanning his sector behind him immediately, laying onto his stomach.

He didn't need to turn to feel Mai hit ground, following him promptly, metal and flesh adding up to one ton creating a miniature earthquake that came and went as she went to JD's left, covering down that range with her rifle. The beat of battle in the background, a red sky, a colony in the distance: smoking left behinds of an enemy advance. There was no need to be ready on his gun outside of formality, and, in any sense, he wouldn't have been able to.

This was his history he stood on.

He felt one tap against his shoulder. It was Mai, telling him to buck up. He couldn't however. Not as he stared out and, even after having survived glassings himself, worlds killed beneath the Covenant, only now did he realize all that was lost.

This is what Harvest looked like. Before the Covenant. Before the war. Looking out one-way fields and fields of agrarian ideals meant to represent what humanity could do out amongst the stars. This planet was a promise to keep, and if war would come to it, two who had seen this planet lost once before would not have that happen again.

An AI, in another history, another world, on the brink of her rampancy acting as the guardian of her beloved, lost in space, would wonder this question then: One that Mai and JD felt as they accepted their situation and what was called of them again to do.

She wondered why humans would be called, and continue to fight. She wondered if warriors would ever disappear from that world.

Three pairs of feet had followed in after of them in the jump. The pair didn't turn. Not as JD knocked himself out of his reverie and get with the mission, finding his sector to cover.

They didn't take the fall as well as them, but Shepard and the other Marines took it well enough, readying their weapons, securing the DZ.

"We clear?!" Kaiden yelled out, the draft kicked up by the Normandy flying away, disappearing into the clouds, making him yell.

JD shot his thumbs up as Mai simply stayed silent, the rest affirming.

"Ship perimeter secure, Commander!" He reported now, Shepard approaching that perimeter, taking a knee by Mai. She was used to, in her life, knowing who she was fighting. Terrorists. Insurgents. Covenant.

Now it was different. She was so used to fighting her own monsters for so long, she had forgotten that more were out there. She forgot she had become one herself. A hand touched upon her and she shook herself out of a trance, looking at an empty patch of foliage.

Shepard tapped onto Mai's shoulder. She was taking point, and they followed.

If Cortana would've seen them all then, it would've already confirmed something she had long known: Never. Warriors would always exist, and warriors will always be.


	9. 1-3: Closer to Paradise

_**A/N: **_From both private messages and reviews, I've learned all of you are very interested in the wreck of the Savannah. I'm glad you are, I do have something planned for it down the road, and within the timeframe of Mass Effect 1, but alas, we'll be there and we'll be there.

Anyway, Covenant focused chapter today. Please enjoy.

Onto review responses:

_**contra140 says: **Hell of a cliffhanger. God, I'm so eager for the next chapter, to finally see Mai and JD in action with Shepard. And I love that the same planet that marked the beginning of the UNSC's near annihilation is the one that will mark the beginning of the Reaper's harvest._

Admittedly it's really corny, but this is a precedent I'd like to set, that and narratively it's important to Mai and JD as characters. The war which they were supposed to fight has ended, and now they have to start another. What better way to do that then literally start it again, back at Harvest. You'll see more of this type of stuff in this chapter actually.

** _Dragon'z Wrath says: _ ** _Fantastic as always. My only concern was the switching between oorah and hooah by the marines/Shepard. It's my understanding that oorah is specifically a marine thing, and army has hooah. But that's super picky from me. Lol keep up the great work._

You're completely right and I should've known better. Then again for the Alliance at this point their armed forces seems to have coagulated into some weird single branch in practice weirdness like the Navy and Marines. But yeah, nice catch, I'll do better.

* * *

_ **Section 1-3** _

_ **Closer to Paradise** _

* * *

Two weeks. That's all they had to reorganize and get a foothold on a planet that was not their own: Altis was by far a beautiful planet by human standards, and, realistically, privately, the Prophet of Destiny could see merit in its aesthetics. The lush, rolling waves were mostly calm bar the occasional storm, tropical weather being wet and comfortable for the Sangheili in particular. To fall complacent however was not in the minds of the millions of Covenant that had come.

There was enough food to eat, and enough places to get food from, that starvation hadn't been an issue. The Unggoy had their methane readily available given the Solace's surviving methane production facilities, and the Jackals had found themselves comfortable in combing the waves for debris from both the Solace and whatever else had been kicked up during the planet fall.

Occasionally they would butt heads with System Alliance Marines, but hostilities had been tense, if not peaceful given the nature of their stay there and the declaration of Destiny.

About a few days in the Solace had righted itself to a rather level sit in the waters of Altis, it having come down on shallows, the activity of the waves and the gradual pressure of those millions and millions of tons of steel eventually causing creases to form and a bowl to be formed for the Solace to sit in.

"Our Rangers have done well excavating and exploring the sunken sections of the Solace, Usze." The Prophet of Destiny drawled on in the makeshift control center deep within the Solace. It had been one of the inner hangers for the Wraiths, but for now, it stood as the beating heart of the Solace for chiefs and section leads to organize and continue the recovery efforts.

Usze nodded once in respect, arms behind his back. They all stood, almost in a circle, before Destiny. Karonee would've enjoyed at least a moment to settle her feet and sit on her knees, however she was given no luxury. She shot a look at Usze, something of an approving look coming from her eyes down to him. He had no reaction. He lived to serve.

"I took the liberty of reorganizing the Ranger lances into the Shadows, less than 23% of the Solace's special forces were on-board during the attack." Usze explained. "And seeing as our current orbital operations are… less than ideal, I felt like administering them to subnautical operations was pertinent." Usze typically talk with such formality, with such big words, but he was talking to one of the lesser Prophets. Or, more realistically, the Prophet. Truth, Regret, Mercy, the Hierarchs were lost to them, and so Destiny filled in their place.

Ironic, the young Elite thought, he wanted to avoid playing host to the Prophets, and here he had been as Karonee's newly appointed Executive Officer. Responsibility had a choking effect on him, the walls of that place feeling smaller and smaller as more and more people looked to him for guidance or orders.

He looked up at the ceiling, trying to guess where the Ardent Prayer was. The Corvette was holding station in atmosphere above the Solace, acting as guard and moving in line with the fleet movements above from the Council and Alliance ships. If they were to fire upon the Solace the Ardent Prayer would give the Solace time to respond, the Ardent Prayer acting as a shield. For the meantime a Brute had been called as its Shipmaster, something Usze (and most of the Elites for that matter) had disapproved of, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

Karonee approved however, and for that Usze would stay his tongue.

"Good." Destiny had held his own chin with his long fingers, worm like unto themselves. "Even though we have made arrangements for land here to be claimed as our own, the Solace will have to remain our main home here now for the time being."

Karonee tilted her head at the Prophet. "Given our… circumstances, I would caution salvaging from this ship for resources. The Solace needs to be preserved. For in the future we may see to it that she rise again."

Destiny had blew air through his nose. "A CSO-Class ship takes years to construct with Forgemasters and Assemblies, dear Shipmistress." Destiny had advised them all. "We posses no such things anymore."

"And I would also air caution toward inviting such help from this Council in any idea of repairing this ship." Usze crossed his arms. The table around agreed. It was too easy to imagine: Every action had its subversion. No doubt that Humanity or the Council would gleam secrets, no matter how trivial, if they had come aboard the Solace under any auspices.

"I see you still speak of espionage and war." Destiny pointed out.

Karonee had settled into her own gravity chair at that. She had one, as did Destiny, sitting across from each other at that table.

She remembered deftly of her family, the Karons, on Sangheilios. They were a proud family of leaders, leading troops into battle, not from behind bridge of ships or tables to delegate or decide action. She lived in the doing and, her recent excursion in the Scarabs to reclaim the captured crew was her first time on the ground in such fashion in years.

War was all she knew.

War was all anyone there knew.

The Chief Engineer of the Solace had looked up at his accompanying Engineer, floating inconspicuously over his shoulder. It chirped at him, and he nodded, moving his mandibles, considering his words before speaking. "Faster-Than-Air reports that the individual security measures and electronic protocols for the Council and the Humans are… basic at best. Rudimentary. Simple. Any intelligence effort on our end would be trivial."

Destiny had looked to the Engineer, Faster-Than-Air. "Do you gleam any more advantages in your study thus far?"

Its blue, tentacle like head with its black beady eyes considered, tilting before chirping to the Chief Engineer. "We are… momentarily, advantaged. As we always have been to our enemy, barring our position and available resources."

"Advantaged?" Karonee asked out of practical tactical want of knowledge. "Militarily? Their manner of technology?"

It was difficult to answer, but the answer was the same, across all parties: Covenant, Alliance, and Council. The Chief Engineer explained.

* * *

Cleft-Lip had held a Plasma Rifle in his hand, heavy, weighty, still active. The Elites observed used one hand to wave it around while he had to have two, and he was by no means a weak man. People in his terms of service tended not to be.

He fired it off once at a dummy wearing standard combat armor, the blue bolt striking and creating a hole easily.

Captain Shaw looked on with his Marine Officers. For his troubles he was assigned as flotilla commander of Alliance ships in orbit over Altis and thus in charge of cooperation with the Covenant and the Council in regards to the situation. It meant that he had a healthy fleet to contend, not with the Covenant, but the Council.

Galaxy politics never stopped even when visitors from another stopped by.

"You're telling me that these people progressed without Mass Effect technology?" Shaw held his hat in his hand as he touched a barbed weapon, purple crystals poking out of it. To be hit by one had been manageable, if not extremely painful given the ammunitions crystalizing and shattering effect in the wound: to be hit by several and have their resonance react to one another however was lethal. One Marine had experienced this and his body had become a talking point about the laws of war in the Council already.

Still, it seemed all dwarfed when that information was slowly being disseminated:

The Covenant came from a different reality.

It made sense, and yet it didn't at the same time. To the Covenant it was understandable why it had happened in a purely equation like way: the nature of Slipspace combined with its misuse in an as yet to be specified incident paved way for such dimensional incidences. Slipspace, while a natural concept to them, was still being explained to the inhabitants of that Galaxy, however when understood it too was liable to see clearly. Shaw understood it at least.

And the same was with Mass Effect technology on the Covenant's end, a new FTL method taken by them easily and understood. The concept of the Relays: of an ancient civilization leaving its mysteries and machines behind, was not unprecedented to them. If anything it was holy. Just not their specific kind of holy.

"Correct." Cleft-Lip answered, placing the weapon down on the firing bench. The Perugia's firing range had come to host almost every single observed weapon from, not only the Covenant, but from the other faction: the UNSC. "And because of that their grasp of conventional science is magnified compared to our own. They do not have the frame of reference."

Kenneth Donnelly was the Perugia's head of engineering as far as power was concerned, the Mass Effect Cores were his forte. To his side had been Gabriella Daniels, responsible for the engines. Connected at the hip, the red hair, square jawed man and the smaller, almost ruby headed woman had been on top of anything related to engineering. They worked together well, both by nature, nurture, and pure unwavering tension between them that ranged from theoretical, practical, and sexual. That tension was honed by both of them as they held two different kind of pistols in their hand.

One has an "M6D", chambered in a goodness to honest ammunition that hadn't been seen since the Archives were found. The other was simply labeled a "Plasma Pistol". On the hip of one of the Marines observing had been the M-3 Predator, a standard issue pistol for Alliance Marines.

The concept was the same: all of them pistols, sidearms, and generally, all did the same job. Just each had its own way of doing.

"I concede that the Covenant, on paper, is more advance than us." His voice was Scotch as he chimed in. "But both them and their humanity, they have a near four century lead on us, and were not given what we had."

Daniels aimed with the Plasma Pistol. It had no sights but she heard, faintly, the coil whine. The floor was to them: men and women looking at them for answers. For the Marines, it was if they could fight effectively against them without the technological difference being too high. For Shaw, it was if the Covenant would become delectable for their advanced knowledge, played for by all parties.

She offered this: "However I don't think, as it stands, we're necessarily dealing with a power that is four centuries ahead of us."

Shaw had been gathering his thoughts as she said, he needed clarification.

She gave it.

* * *

"We have our own inherent advantages, yes." The Chief Engineer of the Solace spoke to Destiny. "Our ability to crack their software, the sheer scale of our theoretical deployment capabilities, and our technologies we've developed in the absence of what they possess, most namely Slipspace and how we achieve spaceflight. We know these advantages, we used it against the humans for the duration of this entire Age."

"Then what you are saying then is…?" Usze worried.

"We have different solutions yes, but we each answer the same set of questions in the end, and what answers we do have are in light of our situation without their… Element Zero. Our advances over them are only because we exist as alternatives. On top of that we do not have the same capabilities to act on or use those solutions again."

* * *

"Think Solar versus Gas." Donnelly went on. "Both can achieve the same end, in providing power, and each has its advantages, and indeed to harness one might require more background development, but in the end it answers a need that exists to both of us: they can't disregard that."

Shades had been there with Cleft Lip. Sending a few rounds down range with the Covenant's Carbine, shooting green rods seemingly down range. "Recoil, ammo capacity, size and form… They still have to answer to these things." He dropped his shades down, revealing eyes that had been toyed with with hardware: bionic eyes that is. "The future, or at least, the logical step in development lies in what happens when we combine both technology."

"Then why was the UNSC losing?"

What had been a general secret among the Alliance present, those who needed to know, and even the Covenant, had been the UNSC. The Covenant made no mention to the Council about the UNSC, the War. They wouldn't have in their position: to let people know that they were in conflict with a humanity and, for a moment, transferred that hostility onto the Alliance.

The Alliance knew however. From the Spartan and the ODST.

"Because the Covenant was more advanced than _**them**_. Because the advantage they had was one they wielded in their galaxy and their galaxy alone."

The Covenant was an Empire, they had learned. One that only a horror story called a Spartan could fight.

* * *

Destiny sucked in his breath. The Covenant had always been the giants in the galaxy. Superiority built on holy crusade, manifest destiny, and just pure reclamation of the progenitors: the Forerunners. Here, that wasn't the case.

"We have no shipyards. No logistics. No worlds of our own. No fleets or armories or even the touch of our Gods here." Destiny understood his Chief Engineer.

They were the Covenant now. What was once hundred and hundreds of billions in population, spread out over thousands of worlds, all unified for one purpose, was now a meek several million: a Corvette and a broken down super carrier to their name.

They weren't an Empire now. They were refugees by force.

"That is why we cannot be at war." Destiny continued, saying it almost bitterly.

One of the Elite Heads, appointed to spiritual matters, had tipped his head up. "Are the humans we deal with now, false in their heresy, their blasphemy, toward the Great Journey? What is their nature Hierarch?"

That was the only reason why Humanity was an enemy at all: they were a stain to be purged, only death would do for them in light of the Great Journey. Though that was the humanity of their reality, their universe. Not here.

Destiny sucked in more breath. Indeed already they had entertained the humans more than the Covenant ever had. They spoke, they diplomatized, they were… civil. Returning from that declaration from intent two weeks ago and promised, by delegates from all species, that cooperation was the goal there, it was the exact opposite of what the Covenant had done for the last thirty years.

"It is a question of… faith. Our faith. Our gods." Destiny started, like a sermon. Everyone intently listened, section chief or not. They needed to know. "We understand that the Humans, those who make up this… Council, base their technology, their societies now, around technological objects from a civilization that they know as Prothean. We understand this. As the Forerunners are to us, the Protheans are to them. How they revere their progenitors is not unitary, as it is with the Holy Covenant. But we do not pledge to Protheans. Our Gods are not Prothean. We owe our Gods faith, even in domains not of our own. Whether the Protheans deserve the same holy reverence by the people of this reality is not for us to decide, and though it might do us well to respect these progenitors to a degree, the Mantle of Responsibility was not gifted by them. Our responsibility, our faith, is to Forerunner, not Prothean. We cannot disregard that."

"Then…" It dawned on Karonee, what Destiny was saying. "These humans have not transgressed on our Gods."

Destiny closed his eyes, nodding once. "These humans, even if they are in the same manner as our enemy, the same blood, the same mannerisms, the same appearance, are not guilty of sin. They are ignorant of our Gods, and could not know otherwise. Was the Covenant not only two species at one point? Ordaining divine wisdom across the stars?"

Usze felt a fire in his lungs. A feeling he had not felt before.

A feeling he had shared unknowingly, with two humans that they did know, that were heretics. Somewhere, there was a Demon and her Imp that they did have holy writ to kill. Though that was not being discussed now. "We have no qualms then that derive from holy scripture?" He asked.

"For reasons of faith, for us to be, as always, better than those without the knowledge of the Great Journey, in our wiseness, these humans do not deserve to be destroyed."

Peace. They were at peace with a humanity. The Brutes present had sniffled, fighting within themselves. The Grunts would take any order, war was scary anyway. Jackals couldn't care any less. Hunters, Engineers, they would be the same. The Elites however…

What did their honor demand they do? To leave a fight? Should they continue, even against a false enemy, dressed in the skin of their true one? The Covenant guided, but did not dominate primordial instincts: especially one of a warrior race.

Karonee stared down on Usze from her chair, and only after a minute he had noticed, looking up at her. She did not look away. They both had the same worries. If the Elites were not to fight, what were they to do?

"What is our way forward then, holy seer?" The Grunt Deacon in charge of Hydroponics said in a shrill tone.

"We ensure the Covenant survives today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. Our Great Journey still awaits us, either in death, or in consecration. If our way forward lies in returning home, to our reality, then we shall pursue those ends when we are able. Humanity is not our enemy. War is not in our favor. We will do anything to ensure our place in not only this universe, but our own, just as we always have. Is it affirmed?"

"Aye." The round table had started affirming, chief heads called for a vote.

"Aye." Said the one-armed Elite in head of medical.

"Aye." Said the Elite, in charge of ship security.

"Aye." Said the Chief Engineer Elite, working with the Huragok. "The Huragok affirm as well."

"Aye holy seer!" Said the Grunt, in charge of Hydroponics and food production.

"Aye." Said the Brute, reporting and representing the Decanus Mercaius. Reluctantly, but affirming.

The table went around, like a human clock, until it came to Usze, XO to Karonee, head of Special Operations. He waited a moment longer than most, arms crossed, considering peace. It was a scary prospect. The place of the Elites when left idle, even if still charged in the defense of the Prophets, was not the same without a cauldron of war to throw themselves into, to look into. Freedom was on the horizon, and it was freedom he did not want.

"Aye." He said.

Then came to Karonee. "Do we come to live in this galaxy, Hierarch?" She posed a question before voting. "Is it not the same, astrologically, as our own? Do we not reclaim our birthright as Sangheili? As Jiralhanae? As San'Shyuum and so on and so forth?"

"As always, my dear Shipmistress, we are the Covenant first." Destiny said, stern, bite behind it. "But if our history, our original domains and our claims to it shall assist to that end, then yes, we remember who we were."

Karonee narrowed her eyes for but a moment. She was rare. She did not like a Prophet. Between his passes at her, his ways of showing his place above her, from the way his fingers graced her body and the… manner of insinuated and implied wants and needs, she held something unique to her. She did not like him as an individual, and had her bias. Not because of unwavering faith to the Covenant, but because he had been who he was. She fought hard to make sure those seeds of discontent were not spread to areas that she was faithful to.

But now, to be reminded that she was Covenant first, she couldn't help but think that something was inherently wrong with that: to not be able to worry about her people.

The arm of her chair rang. It was the Solace's AI. "Shipmistress. Alert from Ardent Prayer."

"Go ahead, computer." The room chimed in.

"Three ships, unknown class and configuration have entered the system. Alliance ships moving to escort, Council ships moving into guard line."

"To me." The holographic display on her chair showed three ships: It was as if they were like a comet: its head a ring, trialed by three metallic tails. None of the Council or Alliance matched them. The mystery of who they were however was confronted with communications.

It was Captain Shaw. "Shipmistress Karonee." It was a vidcomm, beamed to her chair. She nodded as a greeting. "A matter of… galactic importance has arisen given information the Covenant has shared with us."

Indeed, even in its obviously cauterized and censored form, the data packets sent to the Council by the Covenant had been providing dividends of info. All this needed to be digested before the initial statement proclaiming their extra-dimensional status would be passed.

"Go on, Captain." Karonee urged him. Shaw seemed stressed, but then again that was the story of the last two weeks.

"A representative of another space faring race wishes council with a member race of the Covenant alone."

Destiny picked his head up, alert. The Covenant was whole. Not willing to be dealt with individually. To pay heed to such thing would go against their preservation.

"Captain Shaw, please pay heed to the Covenant's structure. Such envoy or councilship are the affairs of my race." Destiny had opened up his own comms, intruding on the channel.

Shaw nodded in return, but grimly. "We understand, Prophet of Destiny, and an envoy ship is being transported to you now for matters of the Covenant as a whole, however you must understand that in this case, the _**Sangheili**_ specifically have been called to for council alone."

The Elites all perked up. They were being called on for a purpose. Though even then, they were denied. They had their leash and it was held.

"Then it shall not happen." Destiny said flatly. "We have no interests in talks in such context."

Shaw furrowed his brow. "There is a revelation of galactic implications that surrounds this, and we believe it is in the interests of the Covenant if they wish at all, any self-actualization."

"You would deny us otherwise?" Destiny bit.

"No." Shaw had seen the err of his words, rolling back. "But your position in our space can be… limiting. And what we believe is being offered to you is… great."

The three ships approached, the Council ships backing off, almost as if aiming their guns at them as the Alliance ships led them to over Altis.

"And what would that be?"

Shaw straightened his teeth, sucking in air. "I cannot say. However, we strongly advise continuing this dialog with the appellate."

Destiny wasn't pleased. He wasn't pleased in the sense molasses floods a town: a slow disaster that could be avoided, but damaging all the same to those in the way. He was being forced to weather it. "Who are they?"

Shaw didn't answer. Not as communications rung from another channel. Karonee transferred it to the conference table's own holo projector. To say no, to agree, to speak at all, they needed to answer. The phone was picked up.

The image reminded them all of the Elite Rangers and their dome like helmets: a pair of what was assumed to be glowing eyes behind the tinted visors. Orante hoods had covered said helmet, belts and leather adornments on what looked like a suit. The background was clearly the bridge of a ship, a crew at work, but the subject of that image was an individual. The Covenant looked for flesh, but found none.

The vibrations of a filtered voice came through. "My name is Admiral Shala'Raan vas Tonbay. I represent the Migrant Fleet, and the _**Quarian**_ people, as part of the Admiralty Board. _**Keelah se'lai**_."

* * *

Just as an information packet regarding the Covenant and its species was sent out, so too was one received by the Covenant detail the space faring races of the Council. They were as eminently engrossed in it, however they went to it when confronted with the Quarians.

Ke Nazhumee was suited up in full combat gear, his own EVA suit as a Ranger put on with his men. An entire squad. Upon learning why he had been suiting up, he had understood.

The Quarians needed it to survive.

Usze adjusted, triple checked, his suit's seals for him.

Destiny had reluctantly approved of this meeting. What was offered was indeed too great to pass up. What it was, he wouldn't say when having taken the call of Admiral Shala'Raan in private, but he had ushered a representative of the Sangheili to one ship as the rest of the Covenant dealt with another envoy ship. Two different subjects: One had ben introductions, formal dealings… the other was to be determined.

That was what Ke was tasked with finding out.

"They come in peace." Usze said to Ke. It was his attempt at reassuring the Ranger.

Ke had shriveled his nose behind his helmet, feeling for his sword on his belt. "Were it so easy."

An old Sangheili saying: skepticism a healthy thing to have.

"I will be listening through your recording devices. If there are hostilities you are to exfiltrate by any means necessary."

They were in atmosphere, so Ke and his accompanying Rangers had figured blowing a hole in the hull and climbing out had been possible. Their jet packs had been fit and primed: ready to go, a nice change of pace from diving into the Solace's submerged sections.

"I understand. But there are no Diplomats here?"

"We have none." Usze stated once, tightening one belt on Ke. They both paused, realizing the implication of it. "But we do not need one however. They just request the presence of us… of you."

Usze was not coming. He would be advising the visit. The Ardent Prayer had delivered them there, the two ships floating next to each other. For the purposes of this a boarding pod had been loaded: delivering the Elites to the ship, no bigger than the Ardent Prayer itself. It seemed worn… worn in the way only cosmic dust and winds could, blasted and smoothened by the stars themselves.

"What are we to expect then?"

"An explanation." Usze answered the older Elite. "But we do not truly know. Stay on your guard."

"What are my rules of combat?" Ke asked. He had fought for as long as his now commanding officer had been alive. These were important notices of info.

"Not the same." Usze breathed out tiredly. "The Council does not seem accommodating of these... Quarians."

Ke reached out, seizing Usze's shoulder. "Why me? Why did you select me?"

Usze had blankly looked over Ke's shoulder, then inwards into the boarding pod, seeing the shield wall used to insulate from atmosphere, but able to be passed through in order to board in traditional situations. "You would know what to do."

Ke tightened his mandibles. "Do not mistake my age for wisdom, child." It was the first time Usze had been referred to like that. Only his father had done so before to scold. Ke did the same. He was his father's age and these were extraordinary times. "To rely on me is to weaken yourself."

Usze's eyes widened, but he understood. "It is your orders to carry this mission out, Major." That was what Ke wanted to hear. The younger Spec Ops officer straightened his form, fist over his heart. A salute. Ke followed suit, as did his men.

_ **"On the blood of our fathers."** _

_ **"On the blood of our sons."** _

_ **"Thou, in faith, will keep us safe."** _

_ **"Whilst we find the path."** _

Spoken back and forth, commander to soldier. It was the Covenant Writ of Union.

Usze finished the salute, they all did, their mission made. They stepped into the boarding pod, each of them, a weapon on them, not their first time in such a thing. The only difference this time was that they were, probably, not going to come out, opening fire. That was what unnerved them. This was not their normal.

No seats. They would stand at their stations as the door leading into the boarding pod was closed and sealed. The Quarians had sent them aiming solutions for where the pod could be shot. No shuttle could be allowed. "Too much contamination" they said.

"Am I expected to speak to... them?" One of Ke's Rangers spoke to him. He shook his head.

"That is my prerogative, Minor. Yours is to keep us all safe."

And that was that as machines and the launching tubes closed around them. The lurch, the shot, punched the entire pod forward before they could contemplate it. The humans had a similar device for singular troopers, from shipboard to planetside. It was an... inspired idea. One almost as inspired as the shield window before them that they were expected to charge through, showing them exactly where they were going: right into the side of a ship.

Ke wouldn't admit this but he closed his eyes whenever this happened, only letting the world around him vibrate, shake, and crash.

In no time at all they heard the punch, the collision. Normally they would be roaring, ready to fight, to charge.

He opened his eyes and saw the empty space of a broken in corridor or bulkhead before him. It was almost too clean of an insertion, but this was planned and in atmosphere. Nothing disastrous happening. He was first in the line in that glorified shuttle transfer, punching through the shield wall with his gun up, scanning left and rights: doors. He hit the ground of that hallway, Carbine ready.

The third Elite had left the pod before those doors opened, two Elites each trained on them and whoever laid behind it.

They were greeted in kind. They knew what Quarians looked like. They saw the images. In-person however was different as what seemed like a crowd burst through those doors. Some had rifles, some not. It didn't matter, the Elites all stood their ground and they kept their distance. A welcoming party like nothing else.

Their white armor shone in the grey corridors, the only splash of color being the blue of their visors or the purples of their rifles. Everyone looked the same there, but still, there were defined figures: For the Elites, it was Ke, standing tall, in the center, looking both directions like the predators he used to hunt, alert and ready.

For the Quarians: The flash of brown fabric with circular, white designs. Smaller, but pushing through the crowds, even the soldiers they had.

The two of them decided then and there as she broke through into the divide that they were each other's communication.

Ke approached her halfway and they both took each other in, seconds, minutes, what felt like days at a time. Every detail memorized into their minds for either memory's sake or intelligence. Silence ruled, held breaths kept as the two very blatantly looked each other up and down until their gazes found each other. Even then it took moments more for Ke to speak finally.

"Ke Nazhumee. Major. I have been chosen to provide audience to you, representative of the Elites on this ship." The Elites towered over them, the largest Quarian only coming within a foot and a half of the smallest of the squad. They were thin, almost like sticks, comparable to humans and yet…

Their legs were bowed in a familiar angle, hands and fingers… similar. The Sangheili had opposing thumbs, four digits each hand, however the presentation and the way they articulated movement was similar. That had been immediately apparent to any and all present, looking each other, up and down.

"Shala'Raan vas Tonbay." She offered a hand, but decided against, pulling it back. "I am an Admiral, and Captain of this ship."

Ke had tilted his head at her slightly. "What is the name of this ship?"

"The Tonbay." She saw the question forming. "Quarians hold the name of their ships unto their own personal ones. They are important to us."

"I see." Ke said simply, silence taking them all. She was what he would call a Shipmistress, and she had ownership of her name entirely.

His Elites were tense. He was tense. They didn't know what to expect and only now did the Quarians realize that.

"Please." Shala'Raan said gently, offering an open palm, motioning down. "There is no need for weapons here." Her men had too realized this holstering or at least aiming down and away, non-threateningly. "That is the last thing we want. What we intend."

"Forgive me, Admiral," He personally held his Plasma Rifle tight. "But you must understand our caution."

"As you must have understood ours," she spoke back. "Your armor is necessary, we recognize this. It protects you, but it also protects us. We trust you to have followed through with our need for this, can you trust us?" The galaxy was watching them. It had been for the last two weeks. Now however, this Quarian, she pleaded to bring it back in. She made it personal. "We are not a warring people, but we know how to fight. However, to fight is a failure on our part, and we do not want to fail you. _**We**_ have too much at stake to fight."

Ke stepped forward, his shadow cast on her. "Please, then, dispense with the pleasantries. What do you want of us? The Elites?"

"Please, will you follow me?" She asked. For a moment Ke considered no, but he had a mission and that had been to attend to her. He looked back at three men of his six. They understood the orders before he even gestured. They were to stay with the pod. With that settled he nodded at Shala'Raan, motioning her to lead the way, parting that ocean of other Quarians.

As opposed to the Council and the Alliance, this, among them, felt like First Contact. This felt like how it should've been. Not fire and fury and assumption.

They walked into corridors, and they were the spectacle. Ke and his two remaining men followed her, backed by other Quarians, as similarly clad individuals looked on. Their suits were worn by all, different in how they were painted, adorned, like clothing, but it was constant on all of them like skin. It was like seeing figurines, come to life, mass produced, put out. Individuals, all the same. The suit was their skin.

There were many of them, crowded, every inch of the corridors they went into used or occupied. Only the Grunts Ke knew were more compact in their space given to them on Covenant ships, and it was done out of inherent malice toward them.

Here, it seemed of necessity.

"Soldiers?" Ke asked aloud as he followed Shala'Raan.

She looked back, but not stopping. "No. Civilians. My people."

Children. One of Ke's men was distracted as they saw a child sized Quarian look on, a play thing in their hands, stuffed, soft. The child would not know what it felt like truly. Ke had ushered for him to move before he got too distracted, staying alert as they followed.

"Where are we going?" Ke asked again of Shala'Raan.

"This ship has a sterile environment, used for medical purposes. Our… inherent condition necessitates such a space in the case we needing to be removed from our suits." She answered, slowly, letting them understand the suits themselves. They did, compared to the Grunts own reliance on methane via their own equipment attached to every single one. This however was clearly more extreme.

Murmurs and whispers surrounded them, and the unease Ke felt was not of combat, but of the unknown. "Why would we be going there?"

"We need to test you."

Ke stopped in his tracks in the middle of a hallway. To his left had been a window, looking out to Altis. To the right: doors, all of them open, Quarians looking through to him. His men immediately took a knee covering their sector ahead or behind him. "Medically? Would you dare collect samples from us?"

His voice rose. Surprisingly, she rose back. "You are not test subjects. Do not feel victim here, but we cannot afford to slow this process. Not with the Council. Not with the Alliance. It is why we offer you what we do to get your attention."

"And what is that?" Ke leaned forward. "What gives you such an idea that I would allow you to test me, in any manner?"

She stepped forward as well. She was an Admiral for a reason. "**_We will give you the ability to travel. To find ships. To make your own way in this galaxy._** _We will free you, as you will free us_." She said it with grit teeth. "You have to understand what you mean to us."

He widened his eyes. That was certainly a great deal. It only heightened his worry. "Then tell. _Say so_." Ke ground out.

"I have to show you. That is the only way you'll understand."

Usze had been listening, silently, still there. He trusted his men to do the right thing, and he saw no error in judgement yet. He whispered over comms into Ke's ear. "Move along, brother. Communications from the main envoy ship corroborate what she is saying."

He didn't though. Not without continuing to speak. "Why would you free us? You do not know us."

Her answer came fast. Came deep. It was a natural answer. "Because we know what it is like to yearn to be free. We know what it is to be trapped." She touched her chest saying that pressing down, her suit depressed until it touched her unseen body.

"You are not Council." Ke said aloud. He remembered. "They despise you."

Her bright eyes widened, nodding, but making no comment. The Quarians held blame for a great deal many things. Either directly, or by association. It was a pain put on them for their sins.

"We act on our interest, and it may not be what the Council, or even the Alliance, wants to hear." She pleaded almost. "Please, come with me. We have to be quick."

They did. Following her to deep into the ship, crowds and crowds looking to them, seeing what an alien looked like. Behind his visor Ke could observe back. It was one-way glass. Inside looking out, outside looking in, he couldn't tell what was what in that regard. All he knew however was that observation was the rule of that day.

They entered a medical lab, something that even Ke had recognized. Sangheili detestment of such places oddly created familiarity with the subject of it. It was the entrance to a medical lab at least, the main space of it taken up with large windows and spheres, equipment looking into. Some had unidentifiable machinery, tables meant for operation, seats and chairs and couches. Kids toys had inhabited some. None were occupied for the moment, but that was to change as he and his men were led to the largest one. It reminded him of meditation chambers on High Charity, white and sterile, smooth and, vaguely, calming. It was if the air itself was clean, and that meant something even on a filtered starship.

"Your men may remain on guard here." It was a clear window, and no guards had followed them in. The only people that were in that medical lab had been assumed medical technicians and doctors, all surrounding them, but keeping their distance. "But I need you, eventually, to come into there with me."

Ke tilted his head at Shala'Raan. "Now?"

"No. I am telling you so you can mentally prepare." Omni-tools were still new concepts to the Covenant, so they Elites were jumpy when she flared hers, summoning tablets from one of the desks surrounding the clean room. "Here. Observe this footage. Each of you has something different."

Each Elite was given a datapad, one hand held to it, the other with a weapon ready still. They were only now settling into ease as the quiet hum of the starship surrounded them, the occasional whirring of medical equipment droning. "What is this?" One of Ke's men inquired. Looking at it before realizing it was security footage of a ship, either that one, or a vessel much like that one.

It showed footage of what seemed like an engineer toying with pipes, only for that to stop the second one splintered, sending visible shrapnel through his suit and arm.

The other Elite was given footage of an extranet report. It was a hate crime on a space station known as the "Citadel". Delinquents had backed a Quarian into a corner of an alley, forcing him down, only to rip his visor off. His face was obscured, and the authorities had chased or apprehended the delinquents almost immediately after, but the deed was done, the Quarian clawing at his face, trying to desperately reattach his visor.

Usze was given this: A diagram, and then a video. It was almost voyeuristic, the nature of it, but it was footage taken discretely of what seemed like… a social affair. Humans had something similar, "bars" they called it, where they would go an ingest chemicals to haze themselves of senses. Ke had had many a firefight in such things, and, admittedly, the Elites were not without their own equivalent.

Still, there, in that footage, a Turian held a Quarian, female, the Qurian dimorphism human-like, by her hips. His hands roamed her form, desperately trying to dig deeper, to find more. The Quarian was into it on account of her own ingesting of normally off-limits alcohol that night, and so she had, surprisingly, and the bar had caught notice in a hushed silence, her take her visor off. Her face was not seen, but it was obvious what they were doing.

The Sangheili had no similar motion for this, but he had seen humans do this together in their last moments:

Their faces had touched together, mouth to mouth, lip to… face plate, for but a briefest moment before the Quarian put her mask back on, video ending, Turian very pleased with himself as far as Ke could tell.

Then an autotopsy report: She died. Days later. Rashes and growths near her lip that were viral in nature. He saw her lips, and lips only. They were very human-like. They were also very sickened, diseased, grey and bubbling.

Minutes dragged on, but eventually, the Elites took in that information. The intention was clear, but Shala'Raan made sure to say.

"We are not made to live as we are, without the suits. We would die, otherwise." She said solemnly. Ke looked at her, looked around, at all the Quarians, and saw their shoulders slump. Cursed. That was the word that came to his mind. He felt pity for them. He knew the protection of his armor, how it sealed him from danger, from space, from the world. He never knew it as a trap however. He didn't know it as the Quarians saw their own suits. "We showed you this so you understand what I am to do is not without understatement."

His two Elites looked to him. Nodding. They understood entirely what they saw: what happened when their suits get breached, each of them seeing the effects. Death at worst. Near death at best.. "Death by disease, by sickness…" One of his Elites spoke. He couldn't hold it in. "I do not wish that fate on any."

"Thank you." Shala'Raan spoke. There was an understanding there that bubbled and came alive, seeing that. "May you remove your armor, Major Nazhumee?"

He would kill her, and not by combat. She was asking for death it seemed if what she was to do.

"Why?" He finally lowered his gun from ready. He asked why. Not for the Elites, but for himself.

"I wish to see for myself if my people can survive you."

They asked for the Sangheili specifically. Why, and how, they came to this conclusion, it was a fact overlooked by almost every single person. Too busy looking into history, into religion, into biological details. None looked inward. None looked at a glance, simply. None saw coincidence and followed it.

"This is not the way-" Ke started, then remembered who she was. "You are an Admiral. You are valuable to your people, I would say. Why you?" He pointed to her, and then to the clean room. "You wish to breath my air, simply test your existence in my presence, as the Gods would have it?"

She nodded, she was on a mission for her people. "I wish to see you with my own, bare, eyes. We need to know who you are."

"You know what we look like beneath this." Ke thought that would've been enough. "We have given you information that we have killed over. Do you desire more than that?"

"I have been given a mission by my people to confirm this with the highest regard. They have bet me, and I have accepted this. That is what we confide in you" She tightened her fist. "Our people, we are not just strangers to one another. We are not acquaintances or just friends. All Quarians are owed to each other. We are all family. We are all that we have. I am willing to put myself in such danger so as to help our people understand what you are to us."

"_Then who do you think we are?_" Ke pressed, desperately. He hadn't remembered the last time he talked to someone like this. His vocabulary was that of honor, of military. Not of questions and existentialism.

Shala'Raan said nothing. She could not. Even if she did she wouldn't be able to. It was to admit an impossibility. A miracle. Ke knew he would get nothing as he turned around again, looking his shoulder, reading the body language of his guards. He trusted them.

With the breath he gave came relenting fervor. He knew what he had to do. Usze was watching and he had said nothing to the contrary. "How may I disrobe? In what manner?" Ke said gratingly, unsure.

There was a small nod of satisfaction behind Shala'Raan's visor.

"Your combat armor is not needed. The clothes beneath, how you would conduct yourself when not on your duty station, that is enough if skin is bare." His armor was worn at all time, either with the EVA components or without, but he knew what he could do. His undersuit of the Combat Harness which kept the hard alloys from rubbing his skin would be enough. It left much of him exposed, but it wouldn't be lewd. That was something he didn't want to report if it came down to it.

So he did, carefully. Helmet first. Around him he and his men heard the room seal further, the door locked distantly, vents sucking in air apparently. He was worried, but nothing could be done as they let the sound settle.

The air was unkind, almost biting at him. Too clean was a proposition he had not met until that day.

With his head exposed, mandibles free, eyes unbothered by filters of helmets and visor, all eyes were drawn to him, bare skin, combat armor slowly being settled on the desk besides him.

The last thing he needed to rid himself of was his weapon. His Plasma Rifle was first, but his sword. It was his father's, and his father's before him. As was the legacy of them. "You may carry this, with you. It is a weapon, yes?" Shala'Raan pointed to the hilt.

He nodded, looking to her, trying to peer through that cloud of a visor. "If I need to kill you, I do not need this."

Shala'Raan squared her feet. It was a threat, a promise, but knowing. Ke was a soldier first. That's what all the Elites were, according to the Covenant data packet.

"I hope you do not need to."

He flared his mandibles slowly, as Elites do when in thought, but his eyes softened, albeit one squinted skeptically. His sword was unhooked from his belt, placed next to his armor. "Where?"

"Through here." One of the Quarians around them noted.

It was like an airlock on a ship he stepped into. The process was the same as a laser wall phased through him followed by a misty spray, the spray evaporating and clearing as the door in front of him to that clean room was unlocked after decontamination.

His boots were left behind, his two-pronged feet, raptor like in form, claw like nails on his toes, touching upon the floor. It was room temperature, not unkind to him, surrounded by white. There was nothing in there but two chairs: facing each other. Surreal, oddly, but he dealt with it as he stepped into the room, looking at the glass viewing port, wide as a wall. He could see out, one of his men looking inward toward him, the other on guard.

In the end there was no need to worry as Shala'Raan took a breath, deep in her chest, and followed the decontamination process with Ke, half a minute later. He looked to the entry door, expecting. She didn't remove her suit like he did however. Not yet.

Their immune system was incompatible with the galaxy, their physiology compatible with one place, and one place only, and all that it brought. From what little he knew of the Quarians, told to him minutes before he was sent here and reaffirmed now, any contamination from them especially would've killed them. A simple bead of sweat. Mucus. Blood. Anything, if they were exposed to, their body would self-destruct. Their bodies were simply just not used to conditions that belied where they came from.

It was odd then, that this happened as Ke stood almost naked in that white, sterile, clinical room.

She entered, approaching him, and he stood still. She had to look up at him, but they were almost chest to chest. Her eyes held mysteries and hope in them. He realized now. Her eyes were old, her voice translated through their new software, weary. She was… excited? He could only guess.

"Why would you dare risk this." He said to her as she held her hands close to herself, going through a mental checklist. It had been a while since she had done this. To him, as a soldier, this was a foolish risk. A lesser Quarian should've been used. "Am I not a foreign entity to you outright? What gives you the confidence of-"

She looked at him, the weight of no shaking in her head motions, stopping his words. "I have nothing to worry about if what we have learned is true. I will survive."

"Why?" Ke stressed. Not for his sake, but for hers.

"_**You are a link to our homeworld**_." Shala'Raan's words spoke with a weight, with a sadness, that even the Elites had not heard from the wars they had fought in the name of the Covenant. Even in a Galactic Empire, the importance of the Homeworld was not lost to them. The Grunts had learned this lesson the hardest, when Balaho was given up for punishment of the Grunt Rebellion. Ever since that day the species of the Covenant, privately, all held onto their worlds a little tighter, appreciated it a little more.

The Elites were no different.

The sound of decompression. Three fingered hands coming to face masks, only to hold them, unlocked, let go, fallen to the white floor and revealing an image that not many in that galaxy would hold memory of. Just as some there would know that the Demons were, without mistake, humans, the Elites would know a secret that even the Galaxy had forgotten:

It clattered to the floor, leaving only Shala'Raan's hood, but soon enough that had fallen back to her shoulders.

Once, long ago, there had been primates on Sangheilios. Hunted down by the evolved Sangheili and their welp, evolution thousands and thousands of years ago had made them only be recorded in cave paintings and ancient tales. The only thing to truly survive of those details: ridges, designs almost, lined on their heads. Antiquated and depreciated parts of the body perhaps that spoke to feelers and sensory implements like antennae perhaps, ear canals at the side of her head, lacking the lobes of humans. Those old stories of extinct wildlife were known to Ke, only for his teachings of wildlife, grown as a hunter. To see it made life before him on the face of what looked very much like an older woman, a human, it cleared his nose, his breath, as if it was fire.

Home: The Quarians felt that as they saw these new, yet old, _**creatures**_, these new people, before them. A respite from their forever war. Visions of the dream, paradise, a future ensured, associated with the Sangheili.

"Touch me." Shala'Raan held out her hand, gingerly seizing Ke's hand. He offered no resistance as his hand was guided to her face. Her touch was unbelievably soft, as if her fingers had been hidden from a life lived.

He was scared for her as he did it. If he were to kill her, he'd do it quick, hands around her throat until her bones broke. Not like this. Not via sickness.

The questions the Quarians had for the Elites, wonderment and mystification as the truth was revealed: they were not from that reality. Yet, despite this, the Elites had known Rannoch… They knew what it was like to stand on it, to live on it, to know what it was like to have it as a home.

Fragile, that's what Ke felt as he touched her face, his large palm almost completely covering that side of her head. Wrinkled, yet smooth at the same time. Like that of a pup. The pads of his finger felt hair like silk and glass.

Warmth. Skin on skin. A feeling stolen from the Quarians, shared.

She breathed easy, breathed him in through the skin of his claw. There was nothing to fear.

The Elites and the Quarians shared many things now.

* * *

He levied his rifle against cover, peering through its optic, but he didn't see a machine through it. He aimed at something familiar. Too familiar, too personal to be an enemy. Nihlus has shifted out of cover slightly, rifle still up, just long enough so his eyes could verify what he was really seeing:

It was his mentor, one of his closest confidants. The soldier who taught him what it meant to serve to a power greater than himself.

Nihlus Kryik was once a reckless soldier. He knew right and wrong better than most, but right and wrong never played well with orders. To do what was right regardless of command it was a double-edged sword. One that vindicated him, and both made him a boon in his military service to command.

"You're too good for us." Said one commander, berating him before being reassigned.

He was good enough for who he had found on Eden Prime, near a loading dock as he moved through a battlefield, taking down an enemy not seen out of the Veil in centuries.

His back was turned to Nihlus. "Saren?" The Spectre said, surprised, lowering his rifle as the Turian in question turned. He didn't look… well. He stood strong, resolute, as always, but his body hadn't been the one given to him by birth. Battle, biotics, and bionics had changed him.

"Nihlus." Nihlus could barely hear it, but Saren recognized him. Of course, he did. He taught him how to be a Spectre. If Nihlus was one of the very best, then Saren was the very best.

The older Spectre had been momentarily distracted… he had sworn he had heard, something, by the crates, but it was no matter. He had come here to confront his old student. He knew he would be coming here. Nihlus wouldn't have known vice versa however.

Saren strode over, like a wisp, barely making a sound. Nihlus lowered his rifle still. "This isn't your mission Saren, and I thought you were over Altis representing the Spectres to the Covenant."

Saren looked up at that sky on fire, gunfire in the distance, taking it in, breathing it and gaining life. He loved battle. He did. He loved it as a scavenger loved fresh carcasses. "Do you remember Avitus?" Avitus Rix. Nihlus nodded. Another one of Saren's protégés. "He has that situation now. He needs the… peace and quiet."

Millions of unknowns was peace and quiet. Nihlus joked to himself internally. To a Spectre that might a well have been. The Covenant was dangerous, but complacent for now as far as he could tell.

"Why are you here, Saren?"

Saren again, looked to the sky, toward the human colony. "The Council saw it fit that something related to the Protheans might've needed… additional support. I'm sure you've seen the Alliance, those humans, saw it fit to do the same."

Saren spoke like a sophisticated being. Or, at least, as sophisticated as a soldier could be.

A woman and a man appeared in his mind. Armor he hadn't seen before. People he hadn't seen before.

Saren stepped toward Nihlus constantly, shoulder to shoulder, passing him.

Nihlus knew what Saren was speaking of. "There is… something interesting about Lieutenant Commander Shepard's ground team. There are secrets there that I was not advised by the Alliance about, embarking with them…_**Wait how do you know that?**_" Nihlus turned as Saren stepped behind him, looking his mentor in the eye. Saren paused, as if caught doing something. The class of air around him froze, wilting away.

Nihlus didn't know of those two with Shepard even when he was on the ship. How did-

Saren unhooked his pistol. Just by reaction alone Nihlus tensed on his rifle. Maybe his mentor saw some Geth where he hadn't.

A sound of fumbling to their right, they both looked toward the crates.

It was a human, middle age, shaken, beanie on his head, fear and death in his eyes as he fell, facing them on his side. Nihlus oriented himself toward him, immediately identifying him as not a threat. He thought Saren did the same however, but his pistol was up, out, pointed at a man who had tripped and fell, trying obviously to move away unseen. Nihlus thought it prudent to radio Shepard's team to alert them of civilians. He'd seen a few but they mostly stayed out of the way.

He held one hand to his radio's receiver. "Hitman 1-Actual, this is Nihlus, be advised civi-"

The man was seen, and for that, he was killed. Saren's pistol erupted with a gunshot, right into the man's neck, severing spine and skin from head. That was the power of a Carnifex handgun he used, tendons nearly tearing, nearly having decapitated. He was dead before he even knew what hit him, blood spilling out of him.

"_**Saren **_what the hell-?!" Nihlus twisted around to Saren.

A gun pointed at his head was nothing Nihlus hadn't dealt with before. He couldn't believe it however, not in the millisecond he was given as Saren shifted his aim from out, to in, toward him. It was a millisecond of grace however. Life flashing before his eyes, but the fight burning within him as fight or flight took over, and, no matter who held the gun, the indiscretion would not go unpaid.

At his hip he had, even aiming at the floor, at Saren's feet, he opened fire not to hit him but to at least do something that was to wave off the inevitable.

He knew what a gun pointed at his head meant: it meant he was to be killed.

It meant Saren wanted to kill him.

He threw his head down and to the left as fast as he could as Saren found his mark.

Try as he might, even when Nihlus got the first shot off, no matter how inaccurate or useless it was, Saren had the advantage.

The pistol went off and a superheated shred of metal cut through the top left of Nihlus's head, grazing through his skull, through his fringe, tearing flesh as he tried to dive into Saren's mid-section.

He had never felt pain there before. He had never known what it was like to have your skull exposed. It didn't help that his flesh around the wound tore and shifted exposing more as his head collided against the metal armor of Saren's stomach, Nihlus tackling his mentor.

That was all he could do as he felt the barrel of the pistol wrap around downward into his back, the flashing pain of more metal tearing like rods into his body around his spine making him scream as Saren dropped the pistol, the two colliding onto the floor.

The rifle was ripped away from Nihlus as Saren moved his hands to his shoulders, pushing the man off as blood painted them both.

Nihlus couldn't use his mouth to yell, to shout for help, to advise anything. Pain override everything as all he could was open his mouth and grunt and groan in malice, in anger, in confusion. That was before he felt the blood in his mouth on his back, pooling into his mouth before he rolled over, spit over a glob, and tried desperately to stand on his feet.

He didn't get far before he found his balance, Saren closing the distance, scooping up his pistol, his metallic knee coming into Nihlus's midsection causing another splurt of blood out from his insides through his mouth to erupt.

This wasn't clean. It wouldn't be quick. He tried to articulate words but he had to wonder if the bullet had grazed over his skull and brain hit something necessary for speech. He cursed the spirits for it, but couldn't curse at all as he felt talons around his neck and his feet lose feeling from the ground, rose up, throat being crushed by someone he had trusted with his life, his own arms hanging limply at his side.

Strangled, held up, Spectres were tough to kill.

That's why he wasn't done fighting. Saren had taught him that.

Not ever. Not when his mentor had something planned. All Spectres knew evil. Conflated with it. Fought it. He knew what evil he could do if tempted. He dreaded to think what Saren could do if rogue. His groans from his mouth stopped as he was being strangled, airborne. If it hadn't been from Saren's grip, it would've been in awe in something he saw distantly, in the sky, rise up like a black leviathan from horror stories. Surrounded by clouds, by lightning that was red like the suns, it rose as if coming from Hell itself. Saren paid no mind to it as it lifted off. He knew what it was.

It roared. It roared like the lowest note from the most misused instrument, uttered from the lowest depths. It resonated his bones. It was a sound too menacing to have been real, but it was as he was deafened by it, coming from that shape in the sky, that… ship.

Perhaps it was lucky that the Geth had remained hidden for all those hundreds of years. Now the monsters were out of the closet and haunting them all. Maybe it would be lucky if he was dead to not see what it could do, he thought as he felt the world recess around him, darkness taking him.

Humans impaled on poles, turned into corpses of grey flesh and cybertronics he had never seen until-

His vision returned from him, revelation saving him. Saren looked like them: those husks of men.

He was responsible for this. He, somehow- He needed to pay.

Nihlus ignited his omni-tool, an orange blade was whipped out, swung up with all his might.

Time passed by in skips, for he didn't remember when he could breath air again, albeit still being strangled by an arm and claw around his neck. He didn't remember collapsing to the ground as he heard the sweet sounds of someone else screaming in pain:

His free hand went to his neck, wet with his own dark blue blood, still feeling a claw around it.

It didn't matter though as he tore it off him, the claws cutting skin as he did.

Saren was down an arm: one that was thrown at him as again Nihlus charged at his mentor.

Saren could barely comprehend it. Not when he held the fresh stump that was gushing blood, his other claw trying to cap it even with pistol in hand. Against the railing he had been smashed against, Nihlus backing off as he readied to stab the Turian in the gut.

The old saying rung true however: never bring a knife to a gun fight. Even when they were chest to chest Saren found a way, finding might in his legs, burning determination through pain, and jumping as Nihlus thrusted. The blade went between his legs as Nihlus stood on the railing, pistol aimed down.

Again Nihlus found the barrel of a gun to look into.

This time Saren found his shot.

Not that Nihlus didn't try to do anything about it, throwing himself back, raising his omni blade up for one last play. The gun went off, the omni-blade touching the barrel.

Shreds of metal turned into a makeshift shotgun blast. Shreds of metal upon shreds of metal upon shreds of metal into the system of the pistol, exploding both ways before itself.

The gun went up, blown up, just as its round did, peppering the face, the eyes, the head of Nihlus as he was blown back and Saren off the railing, his hand shredded itself down to tendon and metal.

The largest chunk of the destroyed round: Right through his skull, center and high, but through his skull, through some grey matter.

Nihlus eyes went wide before they went wild, eyelids fluttering as his tongue slipped out blown back by the shot as several dozen holes in his exposed skull, in his neck and flesh, pooled his life onto the steel floor.

Hissing. That's what he heard, looking through the broken vision of his one eye that held any semblance of vision, pierced by metal shrapnel like a watery kaleidoscope. He could barely move the tips of his talons, barely commanding his lungs to fight through and try to bubble the blood in his mouth into air, the pain falling away. He knew his body was shutting down from that: too many holes, not enough backup organs to cover.

The hissing came from his mentor, limping, bloodied, injured grievously. He had won, somehow, that fight, pyrrhic as it was.

For a fight that last forty seconds damage was done.

This was it. "Spirits take me." Nihlus wanted to say.

Saren would've heard if he did, gritting through plates, frustrated, aggravated. He wanted to tear this welp, this student of his, this interloper, to a million shreds and cast those shreds into a furnace, ash into a backwater planet where none would go. How dare he fight. How dare he disturb his plan.

Lucky for Nihlus he was too far gone to feel Saren stomp his stomach, only for it to send pressure up through his lungs, another balloon like explosion of blood coming out like a geyser.

It gave him breath.

_Evidence. Too much evidence. Not enough time._

Saren thought he said to himself. No. The only sounds he made were like that of a feral animal, his back hunched, bleeding from what little flesh that remained on him. He was more machine than man, both physically, mentally, and in his heart and soul. Quickly scooping up his arm, he had tucked it with him, looking frantically for something, something, to burn.

He broke open crates at that loading dock as Nihlus lay there dying. In Saren's painful, mental haze, he thought his student dead. It wasn't enough however. Not with all their blood, their bits and pieces, left to be found by that human, by Shepard and whoever she brought.

Medical supplies he found.

A very, very flammable solution among them.

Saren roared, not like a gentleman anymore, like a civilized individual. He roared like a monster as he found satisfaction in an answer. Gallons upon gallons of the solution were broken up, dumped around messily, fast, inundating the entire dock, bodies and blood mixing in.

Nihlus could do nothing but feel it surround him, drench his body through his shattered vision. He didn't know what Nihlus was doing. He couldn't have.

He didn't see him use the omni-tool on his chopped off arm to create a spark, throwing the arm into the crate of the gallons of solution and go up in flames. He didn't see the flames spread wherever that solution went.

Most mercifully of all however, Nihlus didn't feel the fires take him.

Eden Prime burned around him and all that it represented. In his lucid thoughts, the peace that his dying brain afforded him, he felt a little closer to paradise.

* * *

A/N 2: For those of you who need a little clarification on why Raan/ the Quarians are not at all at great threat due to being exposed to Ke, or Sangheili in general, it's because this: Sangheilios and Rannoch are the same planet in the story. The emergence of the ancient Sangheili vs. the ancient Quarians, for the purpose of this story, was a coin flip, and the difference between how Sangheilios developed and how Rannoch did is marginal I'll assume. Even if it's been depreciated the Quarian's biology are adjusted to Rannoch and its wildlife and fauna. That includes the Sangheili who developed from a different Rannoch. The Quarians are genetically predisposed to be compatible, co-existing wise, with the Sangheili.


	10. 1-4: Damascus

**_A/N: _**Few interesting reviews last cycle, let's get to it, shall we?

**Kelial said:**

_Just how in the hell did they remove the MJOLNIR armor? Every set has needed specialized tools and a damn pit crew to take off and you make it sound like they came off like pajamas._

In the novels it is generally explained that, at least with this generation of MJOLNIR, certain Spartans can apply and take apart their armor on their own. For the purposes of this story I'll assume Kurt-051 taught Spartan B-312 those skills out of her being special. I'll highlight more of this as I go on, more specifically on how her adherence in wearing armor makes her less of a human and more of a machine, but again, I'll explore it down the road when we have downtime on the Normandy.

**Artyom-Dreizehn said:**

_Hope the Normandy comes more as a readily available Fire Support as It did in some of the few fics where Shepard had abuse the usage of it by bombing hard targets, taking out Giant Worms with some specific vibration bombs and so on and not follow the ground out only boots in the ground. You already did great with adding more fireteams in the Ground contingent of Normandy, hope for more people to join._

In this chapter especially I'm gonna start easing you readers into a Shepard who adheres to a little more bite, at least in regards to military procedure. She's more tactical, more inline to how we understand special forces. She's the bridge between the hyper tactical Mai and JD to the rest of the Normandy crew I plan. And as for why I do this, well, it's not as much as to "fix" the story or any elements of, but rather as a way to expand the Normandy in a way, including adding a little more wiggle room to Shepard's abilities realistically as a skipper of a military ship with independent deployment capabilities.

_ **On the Quarian/Covenant issue:** _

Immune systems wise, yes I know what's up. Raan won't get entirely off, but she won't die, just give it time trust me. If exposure to the Elites doesn't outright kill them and instead bring them more inline to Quarian w/ Quarian interactions without the suit, I think my point is demonstrated clear enough.

_ **On focus on the Covenant in the Story:** _

Generally I can say "just trust me" as much as I want, but it's clear that this touches upon another thing all together. In my foreword I made comment on how I was often displeased with crossover stories where singular characters were brought over instead of the universe itself, and this is my way of rectifying that: by having a parallel story with the Covenant that eventually folds into the main one with Mai, JD, and Shepard. In fact I'm sure some of you can call this with the interactions between Mordin and Usze. They're gonna be around. It is in my interest to write the Covenant in this story as I have and I don't think I'll change that, because it's an integral part of this story.

** _My Comments today:_ **

So here we have the first mission of Mass Effect 1 play out. You'll see me adjust lines and what not to either skip over sections that are really, well, playing into the "videogame" part of the story. Also you'll get your first few divergence from canon. Nothing too major and heavy yet, but the butterfly effect is a bitch.

I hope you read this story with the assumption you've played and are aware of these games lore and stories, however I write assuming minimal knowledge of both. I'm generally going to find a balance between writing out these missions and then Normandy social time so JD and Mai can be awkward together in that way you guys love for some reason. This is also an experiment in trying to fold or mesh them two into the story of Mass Effect without outright emphasizing them over Shepard and the OG crew. Bear with me this'll get rolling in more my fashion of writing when we get past the Citadel and go save blueberry butt.

Also one last thing before I let loose: I am bringing the ME canon together in a way, as in, things such as omni-blades or certain weapons mentioned, I'll make them present here. You may have noticed this in how I've brought characters from ME3 (Kai Leng), ME2 (Raan and Mordin), and even Andromeda into the fold earlier to be involved. So be aware of it and don't necessarily call it anachronism. In fact last chapter I started it off with a story from Tali that was covered in the comics and, of course, the ever present presence of Alec Ryder. Be on the look out for Andromeda related elements!

* * *

** _Section 1-4_ **

** _Damascus_ **

* * *

It was in the back of her head and she had sworn it wouldn't let it distract her. She had operated with spooks before on missions, knowing of their objectives and objectives that they wouldn't tell her. Even as an N7, even as an operator herself, she was still a Marine Rifleman, a Marine Officer, first. It kept her grounded to the salt of the earth. She didn't deal in espionage, in top secret missions or operations that never existed.

She served on the battlefield, shoulder to shoulder with men and women who came and saw to save lives, not exert political discourse, domination, or policy onto the Galaxy.

So everything stewed in the back of her mind as she took point with her fireteam on the ground of Eden Prime. There was a now, a mission, an objective, and a probably enemy out in the distance based on the debris, the clouds of smoke, and the gunfire in the distance. But there was also a before, an after, and questions that pertained to them.

She tried not to wonder who Chief Gul and Chief Durante were, she tried not to worry impressing Nihlus, she tried not to worry about what information was held from her and what it meant to be recovering Prothean artifacts.

She tried not to worry, but could do nothing as she felt a hard pat on her shoulder.

It was Chief Gul, towering over her, her rifle in the crook of her shoulder and aimed out. She didn't even look at Shepard as she moved past. Shepard understood what was happening however: Officers shouldn't take point, and so Chief Gul did. Shepard relented with a silent curse, but understood.

It hadn't been that that had gotten her to think however as Gul took point.

What got her to think was how rigidly Gul had been when a creature had rose out of the ground, sacs on its form, floating up. Out of the corner of her eye he had seen Gul and Durante snap at them with their firearms. It was an aiming snap that was too quick, too vicious, to be normal.

"What the hell are those?" Kaiden was unfamiliar with the creatures, unaffected by how Gul and Durante drew bead on them, Durante taking a knee and Gul going rigid.

Around them, in the red sky, ash and sparks falling from the clouds, had been the colonial towers. Prefabricated skyscrapers meant to house early populations of settlers. Much like the Phoenix-Class ships as Gul and Durante understood, these had been the building blocks of a colony.

"Gas bags." Jenkins had hardly been bothered. "Don't worry, they're harmless?"

Durante had leveled his SMG down, but Gul remained, rigidly aiming at them, she on point, leading. She looked back at Jenkins, her helmet's profile shown to him by the side. She said nothing, but asked still.

"They're fungoids, use gas from lakes and swamps to avoid predators. They feel like their in danger, obviously." He went on, Gul unmoving for a few moments before nodding to herself. Yes, they were only harmless.

"Gul, on you." Shepard had reminded her. "We have bigger fish to fry."

There was a small stream before them, yards away from their designated landing point, the gas bags having arisen from them. For those without filters however they knew it hadn't been the stream a putrid smell had come from. Durante had looked left, eyes keen, and on an outcropping of rocks-

He snapped once with his fingers, signaling for Shepard and Gul, pointing toward what he saw:

At first it would've been easy to mistake for a fallen tree, small as it was, darkened and blackened like firewood.

Shepard signaled to Durante and the rest of the men, pointing toward it and to push toward, rifles up and ready. There was no need however as they finally identified what those black shapes were.

"Oh god, what happened here?" Jenkins was right to disparage. The dead were before him: human bodies run thin and ragged like jerky, roasted alive.

The rest of the fireteam rose up to see. "What do we have here?" Shepard asked strongly, looking out down the path they were on.

Durante knelt down. Three bodies, most likely human. His gloved hands reached down, touching the corpse. Grisly as it was it revealed information. Recent kills. Weapons fires denting the bodies upon impact, as to what kind of immolation occurred he couldn't tell, clothes baked on like scales.

"Energy burns. Recent. Last ten minutes." He blurted out.

"Shot?" Shepard asked. Durante shook his head affirmative.

"Likely. From above. Impact wounds torso up, suggest downward fire."

Gul had scanned the skies up, she hadn't suspected such a thing, but she made a note of it.

Jenkins knelt down besides Durante, and shock trooper could only give his silent condolences. He knew what the man was saying in his twisted face: these were his people, his neighbors, whoever they were, burnt to a crisp. No one deserved to die like this.

"Permission to scout ahead?" Gul had blurted out suddenly, shouldering her rifle more tightly, looking down the path that took them on the side of a cliff: that's the only way they could go.

"Negative." Shepard had affirmed, looking up to the sky. "It's what Nihlus is for."

She saw Gul slightly turn her helmet clad head at her. "He's not on our path of ingress."

True, Shepard relented. But still. "Keep together. I'd rather be ambushed like this than one alone."

The rock outcropings provided ample cover as they kept up the five meter spread, scanning their sectors as they walked forward. Even with shields Mai walked as if she had none. It was how she was trained. The shields were last resort.

At least Gul had asked Shepard if she could take point. She could take the surprises, but her feet were not the lightest. It was Corporal Jenkins had had pep in his step, wanting to go fast. This was his home after all. He needed to go, and so he stepped forward perhaps, maybe, a little too far.

She saw it before anyone. She saw the twitch, the shift of color, heard the hum of some sort of repulsors peek through the trees and vector toward them. Spartan Time. Lives lived in seconds as she had snapped faster than anyone there. She had reacted faster than Jenkins especially, the man out in the open without cover to his name, to his life. She saw to rectify it as Jenkins felt a ton throw itself on him.

"Contact!" Kaiden yelled out, and first contact was had.

Two weeks. That's how long it took for Durante and Gul to find themselves in a middle of conflict again as Shepard hoarsely echoed Kaiden, their rifles tucked into shoulders and opening up toward the flying machines that had come.

These drones had opened fired peppering toward Jenkins, only to find him blocked by a glittering, human shaped object that had lain over him. The Kinetic Barrier had kicked in first, laying over her energy shields as she simply taken in the damage, sponging it up as she felt the tell-tale feel of enemy fire bounce off her.

It felt like bullets, as far as she could tell. She'd been shot before and it felt distinctly like the firearms of the Insurrection.

All it really meant to her was that she could survive this if she had thrown Jenkins beneath her, behind, and brought her rifle to bear.

That was up until she heard the return fire of a team she was not used to having come behind her as she laid over Jenkins like a bunker.

Gul had lain over Jenkins, Durante bolting forward with his SMG, slamming into an outcropped rock, only to bring his hand against his, thumb out, resting the bore of his SMG on it.

Fire, it erupted from him, shots into the sky and finding their mark in metal, the crunch and crash of those hostiles flying into the ground near moments after one another in rapid succession. Shepard had pushed up as the third drone hit ground, Durante shrinking back into cover as his cooling systems smoked, the weapon falling onto his chest to be hung from his sling. Only then did out come his pistol.

It was a learning process. One that both he and Gul had to learn in a non-combat environment that was the Buffalo shooting range as offered to the Marines stationed there. Ammo and a combat rhythm not based on mags and limited ammo capacity, but rather thermal overheating. Gul had been better at it. Her ops behind enemy lines with the Covenant had necessitated her using weapons that were similar to the galactic standard here: overheating Plasma Rifles, Pistols, and of the like. Durante had a larger curve however, so used to an SMG, sixty rounds at a time, a rapid-fire nail gun under any other pretense. He knew the motions to reload it, knew that it took less than two seconds to do so after so many times doing it. Here he was forced to wait if he had just held down the trigger like he was used to, pistol out, cursing himself in not remembering as his hand ghosted the motions to go for magazines that were not there. Muscle memory, something his Commander noticed as she joined him in cover, put in the back of her mind for now.

Shepard slapped his back once, the man nodding without looking at her as he poked out and aimed said pistol, she moved around him, rifle up and out as she approached the downed attackers, smoking in the ground.

Kaiden's assault rifle opened up behind them, seeing three more drones approach as Shepard moved in on the downed ones.

She emptied a burst into their bodies, silencing them forever as she moved offside into a depression, wet with water runoff, a knee taken as she opened fire back up at the contacts.

"Jesus Christ you're heavy!" Jenkins had yelled up at the woman shielding him. She made no response but a grunt, coming up and out, rifle ready as she ran up with Shepard. There was nothing to be found however as her commander find her targets, in one burst, one swipe, three of them shot down, rolling down that incline to just before them.

One of them had ended up beneath Gul's boot. The crack of it alerted Shepard, turning back only to see her stamp one drone out. Durante had bolted forward as well, aiming his pistol down, putting two shots into another wreck as the rest of her men secured the perimeter cover found, waiting for more.

None came.

"Everybody up?!" She yelled out, lowering her aim with her rifle and peering back and around.

"Up!"

"Up!"

Durante turned around, covering their six. "Up!"

Gul didn't need to say anything as she had ran over to the downed drones, stomping on each again. Her strength with her boots was nothing but impressive, based on how buried each was after she was done with it.

"Jenkins!" Shepard cried out, looking at the man. He was spooked, alerted, turned toward Shepard. "What the hell was that?!"

"I'm sor-" He tried to spit out before Shepard stepped toward him, but closing the distance with speech.

"If Chief Gul hadn't been on you would've been dead!" He had nothing to say back to Shepard, her voice fiery, she was right. She knew how men like him died on the field. So all he could do there was focus on her, his strained breaths settling as Shepard did as well. Gul and Durante had pointed up with their weapons, aiming at where those drones came from, unwavering.

"It- It won't happen again ma'am."

"I don't need no lone wolf stuff." Over Shepard's shoulder Kaiden had seen Gul twitch, barely perceptible, but he only knew it had happened because it caught Durante's attention. Had it been something Shepard had said? "Don't worry about what you can do alone." Shepard continued, but softening. "I just care about you not dying alone."

Her words were like stones thrown at a glass house: the outcome clear. She would not let men die underneath her, no matter what they could do.

Jenkins sunk in, looking up at the sky, the war to come. He was worth more alive than dead and he knew it. "Okay-" he started. "Okay!"

Shepard nodded, turning around to Gul and Durante. "Good save, Chief Gul. Take point."

"How far?" Gul said in her husky voice. It was cold. Shepard tilted her head as Gul, unmoving spoken again. "How far you letting me go Commander?"

"Scout ahead. Keep us in visual."

She nodded, and before anyone could protest, before Durante could even acknowledge Shepard and the rest of the fireteam was behind him, she had taken off.

"Fast." He heard over his shoulder, Kaiden was falling in line with him. "You two know each other, right? She usually like this?"

He shrugged, silent. He couldn't answer.

Three gunshots rung out in the direction of Gul, the team looking to her, waiting for her to report. The sound of metal falling, crunching into the ground followed, a drone having rolled into view in front of Gul and back down the hill.

Yanme'e. These things reminded Gul of the Yanme'e. She never needed more than one shot for them, and she didn't need more than one shot now for these drones. Obviously recon in nature, fast and flying, not meant for duking it out. Yet it still begged the question who was doing the recon?

The two Chiefs however, they would not ask out of fear of tripping the line. That perhaps these were common occurrences out on the battlefields they did not know. That this was normal.

"Not the time or place, Kaiden." Shepard had pushed forward after a few moments, letting Gul. peer over the hill, looking back, signaling all clear before hopping over. They rushed up fast creating a firing line. Five-meter spread in the rather cramped path through trees ahead of them. They had no real direction but to move forward.

"I've got some burned out buildings here, Shepard. A lot of bodies." The flange rang in all of their heads. It was Nihlus again, off somewhere near, ahead of them. It was an inspired idea: letting aliens on the same comms. To Gul and Durante at least it made them uncomfortable. "I'm going to check it out. I'll try to catch up with you at the dig site."

Shepard touched her head piece once, clicking an affirmative with just that noise. "Take a knee." She said once, all of her men freezing amongst said trees they were moving forward into, scanning. "Jenkins." She called out.

"Yes ma'am."

"Anything you know about this area?"

He shook his head. "Usually didn't come out this far from the main colony. This plateau was just a good place for inbound and outbound ships to cycle through."

She paused for a moment, considering, looking to the sky and trying to hear the battle around them on that planet. "The Geth definitely have to be here for the dig site then." If it was important to her, then it could be important to them.

Geth. A name to the enemy. She finally said it aloud.

"Haven't been seen outside the Perseus Veil in over two centuries, Commander." Gul ground out, unturning on her knee, looking through her weapon's optic forward. That was a fact they all knew. Of all the aliens in that galaxy, the hostility that they put forward, from the Turians to the Krogans and the Batarians, they were inherently political, or otherwise able to be rationally understood by mankind.

Only the Geth were incomprehensible.

But knowing incomprehensibilities was a matter of knowing combat, and Shepard knew combat and all of its surreal forms. She knew what was incomprehensible and how it needed to be addressed and right now her two Chiefs were incomprehensible to her. Why were they with her?

Had the Alliance known the Geth were coming? Had these two been the response to that?

The need-to-know basis was something that cut both ways for Shepard. She needed to know.

"You're Navy Black Ops. Is that fact completely true, Chief Gul? Chief Durante? This the first time we've engaged the Geth?"

* * *

Shepard asked questions, that much Mai and JD were aware of now. Naturally she would. Shepard was their XO, their field officer, and entrusted with their lives as much as they two would be entrusted with the operational capacity and survival of tactical planning and execution. Had they been in her place, they would've had the same skepticism, but alas they both knew what Shepard had been looking into and thinking of in regards to them:

Alliance Brass had sent them to fight the Geth because the only people who would in the Alliance would do so clandestinely, as the Geth were never officially reported outside of their space.

Though they were in the same boat. The mystery that surrounded them both had been something else.

"My first time engaging Geth, ma'am." Mai ground out. "Mostly Turian mercs on my kill-list."

JD looked back at his commander, nodding in affirmation.

"I saw your armor take it well enough." Shepard prodded on, pointing toward Jenkins and Kaiden, hand signaling them to push forward. "Any tactical notes?"

She was obviously referring to Mai, and indeed, she did have some observations. "Three of them, almost broke through the outer layer, but only that was at risk."

"Energy shields?"

"Negative ma'am, Kinetic deals with it first."

She seemed impressed. "Okay then." Shepard nodded to herself. "Stay on point Chief Gul. Durante you're on me."

JD nodded, peeling back and behind Shepard as the other two Marines moved forward with Mai. The trio up front didn't make it far before they all took a knee again, the gunfire of Drones eeking toward them as they saw fit to take up firing positions. It was the sound that distracted them from the distant site of what looked like… lances? Poles?

They took position over a depression, honing in their sights as a flash of white and pink was in the distance, running toward them, danger on her heels. She rounded the corner of a rock as she fully came into view for the troopers, two drones having been firing at her in the same swift movement of a chase.

Two shots rang out from Mai again, fast hard, her target acquisition immaculate. Two drones had gone down as fast as it happened, the lone trooper ducking at the sound of gunfire going over head from in front of her. She stumbled, finding safety behind another rock cover, looking clearly at who had assisted her up the depression:

Kaiden flashed hand signals, and the female soldier below them had sent it back, breathing heavy, adrenaline popping through her veins. She bent over at her knees as Shepard and JD rejoined the group, just in time to see something beyond them:

It was the Geth first that drew their eye, bipedal machines of grey and tubes, one monocular like eye coming from a stalk that stood in as their head. As big as a Turian, they all observed. It was easy because they had another human right next to the pair of Geth to compare to. It hadn't been for their benefit however, not as the Geth dragged the man over machinery flaying him out, the man barely recognizing what was being done before a sight all witness to were better off not seeing took place:

Impaled, thrown up high, as if crucified by a skewer.

Jenkins nearly puked in his helmet as Shepard ground through her teeth in anger.

"Engage. Two foot mobiles." Cold words put out from Shepard as she had unhooked her Sniper Rifle from her back, activating it as she shouldered.

She had gotten the first shot off amazingly, even as Mai sent one down wind. Both struck the glowing eyes of those Geth bipeds before they even comprehended what was happening.

"Target down."

The female soldier below them had regained her breath and bearings, shoulder her rifle up and out, toward the enemy, but none were left standing. She held it down however, her support hand going up and signaling for the rest to join her.

"Gul, Alenko, move up to those spikes get that guy down, now!" Shepard ordered with a yell. "Durante, Jenkins on me."

They all moved down the hill toward the female soldier, the monster of a woman and Kaiden moving past, gun up in case of more hostiles, the remaining three rendezvousing with that one soldier.

Distinctly, Shepard recognized her. From a few frames of the original distress message she had seen her. The soldier looked back at her, and immediately recognized who had come to help her. Between the N7 on her chest plate and the fact her face was clearly seen behind her helmet, Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams knew that Commander Shepard had come to relieve her. "Thanks for your help Commander," she was still panting, but regaining composure. "I didn't think I was going to make it."

Shepard shook her head as they approached her, a slight smile put on. "Nonsense, doubt you needed my help to smoke these guys."

Banter. This kind of banter. It helped, kept people grounded. All Williams could do was shrug and give out as much of a laugh as she could. As a Marine this was how she was supposed to speak, and Shepard knew what she was doing: resetting her to a right state of mind.

"Sound off." Shepard asked.

Williams stood rigid. "Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams of the 212. You the one in charge here, ma'am?"

Shepard nodded. In charge, she thought briskly, sarcastically. She was never in charge. It was either the battle itself or nature that was in charge, she was just appointed by her military, by command and hierarches, to deal with it. But yes, simply, she was in charge. She nodded to the Marine.

"What's your status Williams?"

Williams looked herself over, a hand passing over her body quick and fast, checking. "Scrapes and burns, ma'am. Nothing serious… the others weren't so lucky." The Marine looked back, only to catch Mai use her boot to break the bottom of the spire in a crash, Kaiden shocked that she had the strength to do it. The spire came tumbling down, the human on it as well, but nothing could be done, even as Mai caught it and let it down gently, the man was dead. "Oh man… We were patrolling the perimeter when the attack hit."

"Where at?" Shepard asked pointedly.

Williams pointed vaguely out toward the stations further down the path. "We tried to get off a distress call, but they cut off comms. I've been fighting for our life ever since."

Shepard felt sorry for her, she did, and yet was glad that Williams was strong enough to do so. To fight for ones life it had… changed a person, molded them, gave them new perspective on what really was a priority in how to live. Even breathing became secondary to making sure the enemy stopped breathing, Shepard mused once during a veterans Q&A on Earth a few shore leaves ago that she was invited to. She didn't say it out of want of not freaking out the audience.

"You alone?" Shepard asked, carefully.

A pang of hurt crossed over Williams face.

A pang of hurt then crossed over JD's in realization. He knew it well.

"We tried to double back but-"

"I'm sorry." JD said, quietly, like a whisper, almost to himself, but they all heard it and it was enough. Williams gulped air, nodding to herself, damning herself.

"I tried but- I think I'm the only one left."

Shepard reached out, a hand on her shoulder, trying to squeeze through the protective material of her armor. "Not your fault. Not your sin, Williams. You couldn't have done anything to save them."

"Ma'am-" It was a protest, but Shepard wouldn't let it happen.

"Everything is 20/20 in hindsight." She cut her off. During a date, what felt like years ago, Shepard had remarked her partner at the time say something to the effect she would've made a good mother with how she spoke her words. It wasn't even the content of her words, but rather how she said it: like a breath, trying to make people desperately understand that she understood. Shrewdly, she shook it off. She would never be a mother with how her life was going, but it was true.

"Yes ma'am." Williams took in. "We held our positions as best we could, but the Geth, they drove us out."

Jenkins seemed distant, his head out of the game, despite his earlier insistence that he was to get it together. But no one could blame him. This was his home being attacked, staring up and out to the sky.

JD on the other hand was more lucid. "200 years and now… why here?"

"They must have come for the beacon." Williams answered.

It was on all of their minds.

Mai and Kaiden had looked down upon the man they had freed. This sort of death, now matter how soon it was, it looked unnatural. From the hole in his chest white liquid came, as if being pumped into him like embalming fluid. The Marine had knelt down, his gloved hands passing over the man's pained eyes.

"Any idea?" Kaiden asked the Spartan above him. She shook her head. This was as new to him as it was to her, and that meant something.

"I assume you were out here on security for the Beacon?" Shepard had hit her hard with her mission objectives. Williams could only, after a moment to figure out that Shepard had been privy to it obviously, affirm with a nod.

"We've been on station for a few nights now. Thought it was going to be routine, but when the Geth hit us, they hit us hard."

Shepard nodded in return, it was time to get moving. "Walk and talk Williams, you're with us now. Oorah?"

"Oorah."

She gave out a breath, sucking it back in to freshen herself up, to steel for the battle ahead. The three man group became four, walking toward Mai and Kaiden as they stood over the body.

"By any chance you see a Turian Spectre around here?" Shepard spoke over her shoulder.

"Negative ma'am." She answered back. "There aren't any on Eden Prime. None that I've ever met, and I don't think I'd be able to tell if one was a Spectre."

Fair enough, Shepard thought, Kaiden and Mai reflexively falling back in as they approached. If Nihlus was still going dark she would respect it. "What have you got here?"

Kaiden had reported as Mai looked onward, just around the landscape had been some sort… stone structure. It stared back at her like the ancients, reminding her of the places in her galaxy which were often wrought with the most religiously crazed members of the Covenant. It had been artificial at least, not a natural formation: two towers standing above what seemed like a pit.

Kaiden had been more focused on the body as he started to analyze. "Durante, take a look?" JD nodded at Kaiden's order, kneeling down by the body as he used his omni-tool to try and diagnose something. "We've got some sort of fluid that these towers injected into the bodies. Almost like they're being embalmed or something."

Williams looked with Mai toward the towers before looking at the spikes that held some other bodies similarly. "Impaling victims instead of just shooting them… there must be some reason behind it."

"Fear?" JD spoke in one word. The man was dead, that much he could tell, but his composition was, by the second, becoming more and more… non-organic, as far as he could read. He didn't trust he had read the omni-tool right, but he wouldn't air his doubts, stepping up, not another detail he could concretely name.

Artificial Intelligence. That was the phrase on Shepard's mind as she looked to the other spires holding bodies high. "You think an AI would logically use fear as an aspect of warfare? You think an AI understands fear?"

Mai held her thoughts on that word however as the squad considered Shepard's question. She hadn't been afraid in a long time. To be afraid, to be in fear, that was not how a Spartan was. This display hadn't done anything to her but cause her disgust.

"It's classic psychological warfare. They're using terror as a weapon." Kaiden sneered.

Shepard looked toward the towers, the distinct sound of robotica in the distance. "I'll show them warfare." She rose her hand, five fingers flat before pointing toward the structs of stone and metal. All moving forward, but not before JD had been able to go shoulder to shoulder with Mai.

"Your motion sensor catch anything?" He asked her, tapping the side of his helmet, quietly.

"Only us and them, and you're the only one that's green still." She said almost as hushed.

"The Geth have some inherent device against motion tracking then?"

"Ours are tuned toward our _usual_ hostiles and humans. Might be the issue." She spoke aloud their secrets, but it was hidden in plain sight.

The six-man group pushed forward, Shepard on point as more and more of the area was revealed. It hadn't been a human build, that much Shepard could tell as she took a knee behind some rocks, catching the silhouette of a Geth infantry. She reached to her back, exchanging her rifle for a sniper, activating it and laying it against the rock in a knee, steadying. Several contacts had appeared on the site. "Mark targets wait for my shot."

In cover, out of sight, it gave the team ample time to line up their shots on the handful of Geth in the area. Like clockwork:

"Mark."

"Target marked."

"Marked."

Shepard pulled the trigger and every single Geth fell to the stone floor. Mai pushing forward immediately on the off chance there had been an unseen enemy, going on the offensive, but finding nothing as she cleared the corners. The Commander was pleased with herself, reracking the thermal chamber to cool the weapon.

This ground team fought well enough, but then again the enemy wasn't exactly the hardest prey. She made notes on their movement, on how they acted and reacted. There were sparse notes on the engagement with the Geth in Systems Alliance combat doctrine, but, vaguely, she remembered that the Geth were subject to a hive mind: that was where their true intelligence lay, not in the unit per unit functionality.

"Clear!" It was the loudest Mai's voice had gotten that day as she took a knee and saw a path out, scanning it as the team reconvened behind her. This was indeed a pit, but something was missing in the disk like arrangement: something in the center, human survey lights all trained on it.

It was a fact that Williams had noted immediately, eyes wide behind her helmet. "This is the dig site. The beacon was right here."

Kaiden looked around. There weren't exactly any clues that would help them, so he played it by ear. "By who? Our side or the Geth?"

"Hard to say. Maybe we'll know more after we check out the research camp."

Without Anderson there, Shepard had her priorities. Or, at least, an emphasis on what she really wanted to do, burning at her. "Think anyone got out of here alive?"

Jenkins had been quick to hope. "God, please."

JD had taken a knee with Mai out of habit. Looking to the ground. Foot prints. Human boots at least, taking off in that direction. Based on their dispersion it was a run, and there were several pairs, going toward the ridge.

"Looks like it." He said, turning around and drawing the groups attention to what he had observed.

"Sharp eye." Shepard commented. JD had given a bare shrug as she tapped his shoulder, making him take point. He would've lead the way but a few clicks in their radio comms had stopped them.

"Change of plans, Shepard." It was Nihlus, Shepard tuning in urgently. "There's a small spaceport up ahead. I want to check it out. I'll wait for you there."

She clicked her radio several times, affirming she heard it, and with that they were off.

* * *

Husks.

Those were the words that came to all of their minds as they found those spires, human beings on them and let down automatically. When they came down, they found footing. They were alive, but not the same.

Flesh that had been dead, eyes that stared at them like a machine. They looked human, and yet were very much not so as the growl emanated from their throats like beasts.

"Oh God! They're still alive?!"

"What did the Geth do to them?!"

Shepard on point had raised her gun at them, not sure what to expect from them. She didn't want to shoot. Not when they had been man.

That's when they had rushed at them.

A shot rang out from her gun toward the first one in the lot, taking a piece of its chest out. Save for the momentary loss of momentum nothing changed as the husks continued to run at them.

Mai knew what that hesitation was in Shepard as they all backpedaled, unsure of what to do. She stepped forward though, gun down, hands up, only to truly sprint and catch one flailing towards her.

JD's SMG did well enough, chewing up flesh as they all saw Mai took the initiative and show nothing but action against a threat. He held down the trigger at a man-shaped target, and for once, thought nothing of it as that very target disintegrated before him as the fireteam cut them down out of mercy.

Undead. That was the word that came to her mind as this body with holes tried to scrape at her, her grip around its throat with one hand as she knew what she needed to do. If gunfire wouldn't do it without overkill, she would do it with two things she trusted: her hands.

She could've counted the amount of times she had ripped a man's head from his neck on one hand, but it was something she knew how to do after a sickening snap emanated from the beast's neck. It had been Mai breaking it and its spine, loosing it up as she dug her fingers into the wilting flesh, hooked up, and tore her hand one way as the other went in the opposite direction with the body.

Ripped and torn. Even then it was cleaner then what had happened to the rest of those husks of men, peppered with bullet holes and sickly green fluid sprawled from them. The same fluid they observed minutes earlier. Her hands were coated, but she made no note of it, wiping it on her armor as she pushed forward with her rifle into the camp.

The head had been cast asides by her, disintegrating into the dirt, leaving her squad wondering if they truly did just witness what they did.

"Extreme prejudice?" Shepard had lowly commented, slowing her stride next to Mai. The Spartan gave no answer back as they pushed into the camp, prefabs of shelters and labs around.

Jenkins seemed just fine with it as he rose his gun again at one of the husks, the team reacquiring it as a target.

One of the husks had been writhing on the floor, approached by all of them. Not dead yet, not having disintegrated into goop. Mai had been quick to approach it, her boot on its chest as she reached down to grab both of its arms in her own.

Down with her boot, up with her arms, and more than bone came out with the sockets as Kaiden nearly gagged in his helmet. It was no matter that the husk had screamed like a man as it had literally been torn limb from limb unceremoniously by a titan of a woman.

Every movement of hers was one with purpose, all meant for peak efficiency meant to harm and to kill. JD could only process it because he had seen that same lethal mannerism in the Elites as they picked off his fellow Marines and ODSTs. Cruelty was something that the Spartans had to emulate, to become, in order to fend off the Covenant.

Distantly Shepard had to wonder what it would've looked like if she had just done this with something more alive than what they had just taken down.

The husk quit moving, mercifully, as its arms were dropped to the floor and Mai, unbothered pushed on.

The camp had been burning, metal paneling everywhere obviously from explosives. A battle had been fought here.

Williams pointed out a trailer. "That door. Security lock seems active."

Shepard formed a fist, tapping the front of her helmet before pointing her rifle at the door. JD knew the signage. In the flaps of the window: the shapes of other humans. He still stacked up however. Kaiden and Williams on his ass as Shepard fiddled with the digital lock. When it opened, they went in guns, up, out of formality, not malice. Two humans on their point as they breached.

Male and female, one with short cut hair and the other aged enough to where he was losing it. Both in the garb of scientists. JD pushed past them, scanning the room before pushing back and looking out the door.

Shepard holstered her rifle entirely. There was no need here.

"Humans! Thank the Maker!" The woman said, a distinct accent on her as a man stumbled out from the shade, shaky in voice and gait.

"Hurry! Close the door! Before they come back!" Shepard had looked to JD as he took a knee in the door way, shaking her head.

"Don't worry," She rose her hand relievingly at the man. "We'll protect you."

Her voice dropped low, caring. How she could do that JD wouldn't know. It was hard to switch back and forth between combat and the dialect of a regular conversation. Wires in the brain, after enough time out in the front, tended to be twisted. A benefit, perhaps, to him not speaking much at all. It lowered any complications.

"Thank you. I think we'll be okay now." The woman greeted them. "It looks like everyone's gone."

Williams recognized her. "You're Dr. Warren, the one in charge of the excavation. Do you know what happened to the beacon?"

She had an answer. "It was moved to the space port this morning. Manuel and I stayed behind to help pack up."

Mai had stood in that camp, rifling through debris, crates and of such. Working behind enemy lines tended to make her like that: combing through what she could find useful. Before that however… Trash cans held more than their fair share in secrets and sustenance. Lessons learned when living underneath half a credit a day.

JD tipped his head at her.

She shook her head back in response. Nothing useful.

"When the attack came, the Marines held them off long enough for us to hide. They gave their lives to save us."

Williams' eyes had sunken in deeper, the guilt of being a survivor filling her. Shepard had knowingly given her shoulder a squeeze before she turned back to Dr. Warren.

"No one is saved. The age of humanity is ended. Soon, only ruin and corpses will remain." Manuel's voice was creaky, burdened by an unknowable something. He was speaking like a Prophet and JD knew the talk of doom well. When the Covenant came they took the sanity of those who knew the end of the human race was on the way. He might've been the same if he hadn't picked up a gun and tried to do something about it. When the drafts were called perhaps, maybe that was why there were minimal rebellions against it.

This was not his galaxy however, their war. "What's up with you, man?" JD spoke about Manuel.

"Manuel has a brilliant mind…" She seemed uneasy to speak about him, but Manuel had hardly noticed. "But he's always been a bit unstable. Genius and madness are two sides of the same coin."

"Is it madness to see the future? To see destruction rushing toward us? To understand there is no escape? No hope! No, I'm not-" He was interrupted.

"Stay with us buddy." Jenkins returned to his light voice, the one from before he found out his homeworld was burning, for the sake of this man's mania. "Just been a bad day."

Manuel, his eyes went dark before becoming complacent. "Yes…Yes. Yes indeed."

Shepard had nodded in concert. It'd been a bad day indeed. One she'd lived before as she peered back over her shoulder. Nihlus was at this space port as well, and to be frank she didn't need to hear anymore of Manuel's talk.

"Any details you can give us about the Beacon? I don't need to know what it is, just physical attributes, anything I should be wary about it?"

Warren had been quick to answer. "It's about the size of one of those horrible spires out there. It's movable at least, made of some sort of metallic alloy. We could only identify it as similar in composition to the Relays and the Citadel."

It was an interesting fact. If it had been in any other situation Shepard would've been mystified, but it wasn't the time to get hung up. "Can you hunker in place?"

The two seemed uneasy with the idea. "I'd rather not get left behind here, not if more show up." Warren's worry was understandable.

"We'll clear the spaceport and signal for you two to come up to the Spaceport. Keep tuned to this comm channel." She had sent the frequency over her omni-tool to them before turning to Williams, half way out the shack. It was the best they were going to get. "Williams, Jenkins, take point, get us there."

"Aye ma'am. You two stay safe." Jenkins left off, gun up, moving forward. "It's not that far, let's go!"

It was a small hill away, but it seemed so distant as they came over it.

Their radios cackled. "_Hitman 1-Acutal,_" Shepard immediately took a knee and the squad froze in place as she awaited. It was comms from Nihlus. _"This is Nihlus, be advised civi- __**Saren**__ what the hell?!"_

A gun shot. The sound of fighting, punches and jabs, metal clanging. More gun shots. It was clearly heard over the net as a wet slam was heard over it. An small pop of an explosion was unkind to all of their ears as it was filled from the radio.

"Sounds like Nihlus needs help!" Jenkins had put a name to their unease as they listened. They were about to break out sprinting toward the space port, but a monster in the sky had appeared first, staying their feet, sucking their breath out of them.

Leviathan, clad in black, the fires of Hell surrounding it as lightning more vibrant than any red seen in that universe surrounded it. Its natural lines betrayed its machine like nature, the intimidation it gave, so large, and yet so far away from them. For JD and Mai, they had mistaken it for a Covenant ship, but this was anything but. Not as the air rumbled around them like the belly of the beast, all coming from the ship. It rose up into the sky and Shepard fumbled for her helmet, cursing to herself.

"God damn jamming! My recorder is down!" She screamed out, looking right into that leviathan, imprinting its image into her memory.

The rest of the squad did the same, trying desperately to record something of it. Williams had seen that beast before, how its tentacles erupted with flame and fire, destroying the defenses of the colony. Those same images before the jamming started had been seen by Shepard, and now with her own eyes had verified the threat.

The Geth had come with it, and now they were leaving, the form basking a shadow over the spaceport, over them, before disappearing into those blood red clouds.

It would've left silently like a ghost, but it had left enough destruction today that what came next split the heavens. Charging, like a motor, the sound that came next was like a speaker destroying itself, vibrating, making their very bones shake as they all beat back the want to clamp their hands over their ears and block it out.

It was only after that Leviathan disappeared they only now noticed that a thick black smoke had come from the Spaceport: the cause, a massive fire.

"Contact!" Jenkins yelled out, more husks running at them, seemingly having smelled their fear.

It was a lot to take in, naturally, between the initiation of another unceremonious cut down of these husks of men, the space port burning, and that Geth ship rising above the land out into space.

JD peppered a Husk from the hip, popping the gun into his shoulder only when they got close enough for Mai to deal with them, her hand reaching out only to crush them where they stood in a grisly display, crumpling them like paper.

"Hey! Hey!" Distantly the heard a voice, down toward the spaceport, the squad taking a dash toward them. When they arrived at the spaceport finally they found a trio of farmers, desperately wielding fire extinguishers against the flame. "Help us put this out! There are grenades here that will go off if we don't do something about it."

"Go!" Shepard ordered, her team finding fire extinguishers themselves and applying to the flame.

It took them several minutes, all of them, but the fire was never meant to last. It had a fuel source that burnt itself raw, leaving nothing behind but scorched metal and- Shepard approached the hot center of the fire, pistol in one hand and a fire extinguisher in another.

"Damn." Was all she could say. It was something in the shape of a Turian.

More screams. It was from one of those farmers that had asked for their help. "Powell's dead!" Burnt to a crisp. Just as they could recognize their presumed friend, Shepard could recognize the burnt corpse of a Turian Spectre. Nihlus.

"What the hell happened here?" Kaiden said aloud.

Shepard had, wisely, spun her index finger in the air like a circle. "JD, check this out." The rest of the squad had secured a perimeter, ash and soot on their boots as the residual heat singed them.

It was almost as if Nihlus had been half way Glassed. His form was still there, his body, face up, his exposed flesh all scar and burns. He didn't know what a Turian looked like when injured, but he figured that this was an extra ordinary scenario. Definitely, he concluded, taking a knee as Shepard stood over him.

Her luck, she imagined. Her first mission in her Spectre evaluations and her evaluator came up dead. What could she have done different? That was what she thought about as JD ventured and touched the charred armor. Across the blackened armor he ran his gloved finger. A stain of grey came off. Curious. He had felt under his body, feeling the bubbling flesh, drawing away to only as well find that same grey smearing. He had been hardly a combat medic, but he knew the tools of the trade as he looked up at Shepard, something to report.

Even across universes medical advances were the same. "I recognize this," he rattled off, kneeling down to the broken glass jars nearby. "Silve nitrate, or at least based off of. It's a caustic. Burns off growths and crystallized wounding."

Shepard wondered. "Crystallized wounding? What does that?"

JD would've said Needlers, but he shook his head. "Mineral-based experiments. Mostly conjecture, seen it used on lab rats."

To be fair ONI did test Needler samples on lab rats. It answered Shepard's question at least

"What happened here?"

It was never an accident. That much his father taught him as he mentally made a crime scene of the place. If there was an after to this battle, this place would be a point of interest, smashed crates around and nearby, the spread of the fire seemingly very liquid like in its dispersion.

Metal shrapnel here or there, a bullet hole not from them in a wall.

"Oh my god! He was shot!" The farmers had made a note of the human body nearby. Peering over her zoomed with his helmet, seeing an entry wound nearly sheer off the man's head, hung by a thread.

"A fight." Was all the answer he gave to Shepard.

Shepard kneeled down now to Nihlus, his head in her hands, her thumb tracing a bullet wound over his forehead. His eyes had been burnt shut. Gruesome as it was, she'd seen worse. Now it only meant she might've pulled something from him, diagnostics or readings or anything recording his last moments. Her omni-tool was pulled out, scanning the Turian.

What she found had been more surprising than the state they found him in.

_"He's alive."_

She said it so pointedly, so understatedly, that JD almost panicked, the man getting his pack off. Shepard had moved on in a few steps before recoiling back, the entire team with bewilderment on their faces as they turned to look at her. "What?" Shepard tilted her head through her helmet in disbelief.

JD passed his omni-tool over Nihlus's head again. "Brain activity is consistent with what I assume to be a coma. He ain't brain-dead."

Shepard couldn't believe it, taking a knee against the burned Turian, his body nothing but ash in the shape of an individual. She hadn't dared touch any of it, but JD seemed to have it well in hand as he let his omni-tool find a vein and injected a solution meant to keep his blood pressure up. If there was anywhere he would be leaking from they would've been closed off by the burns. "Hang in there Nihlus."

"We need to get him into a sterile environment, fast. Advise we break radio blackout and call for MEDEVAC." JD had taken a smaller flashlight from his pack, looking over the Turian's face. His eyes had been burnt shut. Who knew if he had been cognitive behind it, but he was alive.

Shepard had nodded in agreement. It was a fast message however. "Normandy Actual, this is Hitman 1-Actual pinging coordinates for hot MEDEVAC. Prepare Infirmary for conversion into a Burn Ward for Turians. Out."

She sent it out, closing the comms fast. That was all she could afford to send out.

"Mission still on, Commander?" Mai always talked with her back turned to the team, front pressed out toward a danger unknown, rifle ready.

Shepard had gritted her teeth. Even if he was a Turian he was a Spectre, and even if they had hardly known each other for an hour before hand, she was responsible for him now. No man ever got left behind, but the Geth were after something that would've meant the entire Galaxy apparently. She looked over her men and made a choice, pointing to Jenkins.

"Can't leave him here alone." Shepard stated once, looking to Jenkins and the other militiamen and civilians that started up to move in. "Jenkins, can you set up security on this site, start rallying survivors here? Normandy is inbound and you're gonna handle evac."

The man, after a moment of looking down at that unfortunate dock worker had nodded. "I'll see to it."

"Good." She nodded back. "Everyone else on me. We need to link up with Hitman 2 Section."

Before they had all moved on however Jenkins grabbed his Commander's shoulder, fire burning in his eyes and on his mouth: "Make them pay, Shepard."

This was his home. He deserved nothing less. "Hell or highwater." She answered back.

In the distance more tracers went up into the sky. War had come to Heaven it'd seem.

* * *

Marine Raider Regiment, Third Detachment. Callsign: Hitman.

Twenty men, as assigned to the Normandy, having replaced most of its normal Marine detachment on short notice.

The Marine Raiders had a long history, beckoning back to the American Marines during the Second World War, raiding Japanese islands while America was still reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor, attacking while America as a whole could not.

Much of the lineage of the Systems Alliance military force came from the old United States military doctrine, so it was no wonder that the Marine Raiders that came to the Normandy were… different.

Anderson had argued against Ryder personally sending his own detachment of Marines, his personal fireteam no less, to the Normandy in support of Shepard, but he had his reasonings. Security. It was to keep the Spartan in line if worse came to worse. Prime Minister Shastri had agreed. He had bet that at least Hitman could handle it. But there was more to it: Shepard needed men able to operate under her, to keep up with her, to lead and to command if push came to shove and she needed to wage her own war.

Hitman was his gift to her.

She was once a student of his, and just by that alone, he owed her.

The cannon of the Mako opened up into an occupied building in the middle of the Eden Prime colony. Prefabrications of smaller buildings had surrounded the towering arcologies that housed most of the planet's populations, so urban combat had been something bred and on fire in that most recent hour.

They rose up into the sky like towers of Babel, gunfire erupting down from them and up as attack craft were shot down around them and slammed wherever they fell, plumes of smoke rising from the agrarian fields.

Sergeant Emerson had looked blanked faced at the debris that had come of it, the Mako loading another round as his men created a perimeter in the vicinity from cover. They had been moving down the streets slowly, in one unit, clearing it out of lack of other direction until then.

"You guys the Calvary?" A police officer had linked up with them, civilians and anyone with a gun naturally gravitating toward them. Blue and whites had denoted his status as the authorities, obviously in over his head with a combat situation.

The sergeant shook his head. "Marines."

To the police man it had been the same thing, but he was glad that they were there regardless. "What's your plan here?" He asked.

"Well what's the situation with the colony units?"

The sergeant racked his head, white knuckled, pistol in hand. He was scarred. Then again who wouldn't be? Emerson rationalized as he waited patiently.

The Mako fired off again, a prefab building crumbling as Hitman opened fire into the rubble. The sparks and bits of Geth had been seen in the smoke, denoting a kill.

"We catch these guys alone, we can take 'em. When they're in a group though that's when shit gets dicey man. I'm only a beat cop, I don't know jack about warfare tactics."

Emerson couldn't fault the man as a ricochet bounced off the Mako.

The Mako was in the middle of the street, civilians using its form as cover to escape into buildings that had been secure. Still it drew fire as Hitman around them opened fire back, more and more Geth taking notice.

"What's the status on the colonial militia?"

"Scattered and or still deploying." An explosion had rocked the street, Emerson and Hitman unphased as debris peppered them all, the police officer shielding his head from the dust. "We can't exactly get an organized resistance up without comms!"

In between the towers had been the developments, the agricultural fields and the settlements built for ease of use for the farmers. That's where they were now, and they had been rife with Geth.

They were sent here to deal with it. "Bannon! Harris! Doc! With me! Rest of you form fireteams and go hunter-killer!" Emerson screamed out. The rest of Hitman knew the play then. Door kicking and heart breaking as the group of Marines all formed into their own teams and split off to raise hell. "That should give you some wiggle room. My men will lighten the pressure."

Harris, a larger man, twice Emerson's size it seemed, had rounded the corner of the Mako to join his sergeant, Bannon, the South African woman with fire on her face bringing following with the bald man known as Doc. Harris wielded a Typhoon LMG in his shoulder, burning through the thermal clipped belt he had until, unsurprisingly, fire coming their way ceased.

"They seem as soft as Turians, Kay." The autogunner commented meekly, taking a knee and keeping his sector covered. Emerson knew what he meant, they fell like any other soft-target as far as he could tell.

"Then we play it as usual then. Force 'em out, and that means getting comms back up?" Emerson affirmed, looking to the police officer who agreed.

"I can lead you there, long as we pick up more militia and other cops with me." The policeman nodded, white knuckled with his pistol. "Man, I moved to Eden Prime to get away from this type of stuff!"

Bannon looked distantly out to the sky, barely regarding the civilians who huddled in cover with them before being directed off to different cover. She was a veteran of many colony liberations. The Skyllian Blitz had defined her enough that she felt no danger even as gunfire flew over her head. She felt it in her feet, in her sixth sense, that something was up. In the red clouds, intangibly, was something just beyond her vision.

"You good, Bannon?"

"Aye." She answered, gripping her rifle and reorienting herself. "Where the comm utilities?"

"That way." The police man pointed out. "Toward the loading docks."

Emerson sucked in his breath as he brought up his omni-tool, finding a path.

"We get to the main sensor comm relay, I should be able to boost it through to the Normandy and out into the comm buoys up-top." Loke had looked over her omni-pad, unbothered by the specks of sparks and gunfire come their way. "I know the Boss's fleet is one relay jump away."

The "Boss". That was what they called their CO, their actual CO that is. Alec Ryder exhumed command and so they still referred to him as such, even when underneath another. They didn't mind rolling with Shepard. She was Ryder's finest protégé, but they knew they came here for Chief Gul and Chief Durante. The danger that emanated from them was perhaps more than the Geth here.

"We'll task on it. We're crossing the street in just-" Emerson was about to give orders, to cross the street and lay down suppressive fire for some rapid movement, but he was interrupted. Interrupted by the sound of gospel as the squad looked, and behold, a pale man in robes:

The sign of a cross, of a holy man, arms outstretched and taking steps toward the incoming fire. He took nothing, walking down that street, arms wide open and seemingly accepting of his fate. One of Hitman had reached out to try and take him back, but he was held back, there nothing they could do to save a man out of his mind, damnation before him. He was in rapture, a priest accepting of his fate that came in the form of a leviathan. The words that flowed from his mouth had been that of the Book, a touch to Earth's past that there was, even now in that galaxy, something even greater than that.

_"_ _When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, "Come." I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him!"_

Perhaps, if they were truly lucid, Hitman as a whole behind their cover might've thought about why the priest was untouched as he walked toward the Geth positions. This surrealism however, it took them as the man screamed to the heavens above, louder than any battle could've been.

And he screamed, and he screamed, and he screamed to the gods that would listen:

_"BEHOLD! Damascus will cease to be a city and will become a heap of ruins! The cities of Aroer are deserted! They will be for flocks, which will lie down! None will make us afraid!"_

An explosion had kicked up right in front of the preacher, metal and steel kicked up with dirt and sparks. When the smoke cleared the man was nowhere to be found, Bannon tapping Emerson's shoulder with a hard hit, the man getting the message.

He signaled.

Bannon dashed across the street, gunfire following her across as Emerson and Harris peaked out of cover, gunning down those that were distracted by her.

* * *

Fighting in a fireteam, it was… trying, for Mai. To say the least. With that many people fighting she felt vulnerable. As in, if she did what she usually did she felt like she would get shot in the back. With Noble, it was different. They were Spartans, they were disciplined better, knew how to take shots that would at the very least not be detrimental to her. With Shepard and her Marines, even with JD, she did not feel that confidence as that long walkway became a firing range, both ways.

At the end of that path was the cargo shuttle that would ferry them toward the main colony, but in the way were contacts. That was what had been told to them by the farmers before they were corralled away into safety by Jenkins.

It was times like this that JD had wished that he had a SAW gunner on his team, or, at the very least, someone with the MA5B and its sixty rounds worth of hurt.

He felt his kinetic barrier get hit and his heart had almost stopped. He had never been allowed this kind of flexibility in combat: to know that he could take a hit or two. But then again slices of metal had been scarier than plasma bolts in his opinion. At least he could take a plasma pistol hit and get out of it alive. With what was basically metal shards thrown at him, he had been a little more antsy as he saw the bubble around him refresh.

The Geth, Husks, and drones they fought were standard affairs. Nothing they hadn't, in some other variation, fought before. He didn't want to admit it but the Covenant had been harder, even as he was pinned behind a metal divider with Williams and Shepard.

Kaiden and Mai had been caught forward, Mai's shields recharging after pushing ahead and bearing the brunt of the initial fire from the Geth fireteam, among them: a monster.

Nearly two times the size of a regular Geth, and a missile launcher lugged by it, it shook all of them straight taking cover. Their rigidness belied a uncanny valley to them, even as they kept the Marines in cover.

"Hey follow up on my target!" Shepard screamed into JD and William's ears. She dropped her gun however. The ODST had been confused but when he peered out it was understood. Shepard's hands glowed blue as she honed in on one Geth, close enough to reach out to, she doing the gesture, only for that unit to be pulled toward them and float in mid-air.

It floated past Kaiden and Mai, but they paid no mind, making sure no other Geth pushed up in response, blinding firing down the way.

The floating Geth was filled with led as JD used its floating corpse as cover, pushing up again as the giant Geth trooper put it in its head to charge, fast.

"Incoming!" Williams screamed out, alerting Mai. The Spartan peered out for a moment, only to see what had been rushing toward her. Spartan time kicked in.

She would've spit in her helmet as she made her decision. Gone in a flash from Kaiden's side, he had reached to grab her back down out of pure concern but was too late. None was needed however as MJOLNIR kicked in, her feet throwing her toward a behemoth in a run.

"What the hell is she-?!"

Shepard had almost punched through JD's shoulder with how hard she had directed him to fall in line with him, pushing past. JD would've done so anyway. At this point he knew what a Spartan could do and Mai excelled in it, not as the giant threw one arm down in a swing, hitting the metal below with a crater. Mai was quick though, enough to sidestep, her gun dropped to be held by a sling, knives out, one for each hand. One had found the elbow joint of the thrown down arm, she bending, twisting, jumping with it as a pivot as she hooked her other arm around the slightly bent giant's neck.

Lifting herself up she had come up onto its neck, the remaining knife jagged down into synthetic tendons, deep and hard as the giant seemed to stiffen, up, Mai's free hand which hadn't been twisting the knife digging beneath the hood of the giant's head above its eye and tearing up.

If this had been a human she would've been tearing its scalp off.

It ripped like one, she knew that, as she did the deed and rode the giant down, only to flip around with her rifle up not a second later. There was nothing to fear however, not as JD and Shepard gunned down the remaining Geth troopers.

Every time they killed a Geth trooper the surviving would flinch, as if disrupted, on pause, adjusting. It gave Shepard ample time to approach one stuck out of cover, and pump its chest full of lead. She rolled her feet smoothly toward it, punting the machine with the barrel of her rifle before snapping around and lighting up a Geth in cover.

Mai caught a hint of JD glancing at her before he continued to look forward, onward, toward the shuttle platform that would take them to the main colony. She barely noticed the synthetic fluid on her hand as she wiped her knives on her armor, only to holster them again.

Two Marines behind her had been left agape. "Jesus Christ."

Williams took the name of the Lord in vain, having seen the work of something beyond a soldier in action. It was that of a Spartan.

Kaiden was more the skeptical, but he knew, in some ways, what he had been dealing with with Mai and JD.

"You do this shit on the regular, Chief Gul?" Shepard asked.

"On occasion." She answered plainly.

The commander didn't quite believe her, not as she hand signaled for them to rally behind her, the cargo tram before them after all the Geth had been dealt with. Tracer fire intensified into the sky before them, the main colony ahead of them as they stepped onto the tram. It would be a long ride, but it would've gotten them there.

She didn't quite believe her now especially as the tram moved forward, taking a look at her current fireteam and finding only Mai unbothered, barely a breath spent.

The two women found each other's gazes, but said nothing of it. There was nothing to discuss when they were on the same side. Mai saw Shepard as a competent team lead and Shepard very much enjoyed someone who could stab a machine to death on hand.

JD had motioned to Williams, bent over her knees, her helmet off as she allowed herself a breath of unfiltered air. "You said you had injuries?" He asked simply. This was the only downtime they were going to get as they approached the sounds of battle smoothly.

She shook him off. "Nothing I can't take."

"Williams." Shepard sterned. Mention it now, or it would kill you later. That was the implication.

Still Williams kept it up. "I'm fine, seriously. Took a glancing blow but I put some medigel on it when I could."

JD had to only trust her words with a nod, taking his own helmet off himself, hair blowing in the wind. "Heh." Williams had looked at his face. "I was beginning to wonder if you were a bot." His face contorted shrewdly before shaking it, helmet back on almost as fast as it was off. "Is she though?"

Mai didn't respond, standing like a statue and looking toward their destination, rifle in hand. She'd heard this before.

"Okay then…" Williams backed off, looking to Shepard instead. "I didn't know you were in the area. Usually you have a big enough media presence."

Shepard leaned against the railing, her moment of reprieve taken as her helmet was off, her hair in a bun barely held in the wind. "I don't encourage it, you know. The limelight's not that welcoming, especially when you're posted on a stealth warship."

"Ah. You skipper?"

Kaiden answered for her. "Negative. Just commander of the Marine regiment. Name's Alenko by the way, Lieutenant Kaiden Alenko."

They were both exhausted, adrenaline momentarily drained out of them as they shook hands weakly. "Wish it was under better circumstances… You guys Marines too?" She gestured to Mai and JD, their kits so obviously different from their own.

"Navy." Mai spoke. "SOF."

"Ah. Spooks. Great. Just what we needed today." There was a twinge of hostility that came from the Marine.

"They're not that spooky, Williams." Shepard said lightly, almost in jest. "You guys really not part of the Program?" She gestured vaguely over the N7 over her breastplate.

"Not predisposed to discuss this, Commander." Her monotone voice was barely filtered by her helmet, sending chills down the spines of them all. The brevity of her language didn't help avoid the theory that she was, indeed, a machine.

Gratingly, but like a knee jerk reaction, JD had breathed out. "Lighten up, Mai."

Only they did she turn her helmet slightly toward him. "…Is this the time to lighten up?"

JD knew it was a literal question. To the rest it was sarcastic. The answer was the same however. It hadn't been. She would've rather kept her mind on the battle on how the Geth fought. Even then though, it tried her. This enemy, it all spoke to the tell-tale sign that they had been autonomous in a way. Not exactly hard to kill, but hard to read. No fear in their forms that she could've used.

"I'm glad you're here," It was hard to hear over the maglev hum, but it was heard. "All of you."

It was Shepard, reapplying her helmet. "Shit is so fucked, ma'am." An explosion ripped through the clouds in the distance. Williams language was down to Earth, fully appreciative of what had happened to them all.

"It was worse over Elysium." Shepard reminisced. She remembered the low just so she knew what it had been. This wasn't it, as much of a tragedy as it was: this colony being attacked was just another day at the office. There was way to react at least. During Elysium everything they did was all on auto-pilot, like a body shutting down organs to keep the brain alive. "Slaver ships blotted out the damn sky."

"Some shakedown run, eh?" Kaiden tried to lighten the mood. It was a hoke in two parts. One that Mai and JD would understand, and one the rest did.

"Could be worse." JD said to himself. "Could be worse."

In all of their research he and Mai could not find a time and place where the Council or the Alliance had straight up destroyed a world as they knew it. That kind of cruelty did not exist here, so yes, things could've been worse.

"What's our next move then, Commander Shepard?" Williams asked, needed a bearing, an objective. She didn't need to cool down now, not when there was a fight left to throw herself into. She had men to avenge, her helmet back on. "We move into the colony and help the defenses clear out?"

Shepard so much wanted to say yes, but she couldn't. "I have another fireteam tasked with saving the colony. We're going to link up with them as soon as we secure the Beacon and exfiltrate."

Williams seemed flabbergasted. "What's so special about it then? Huh? Doesn't this colony take precedence?"

Tactical objectives, resources, pure preservation. These were reasons why JD had to leave people behind to die in the Covenant war. He understood William's distress. He really did. But orders were orders, for the greater good. Anderson had called it, and so he knew best.

Shepard seemed sad, bitter, but she gave her answer. "I don't know, Williams. It's just my orders. And if its Prothean it might actually mean more than this world."

Moments passed, Williams understood, but she felt something that she needed to say, to keep herself sane.

"It's cold of you to say ma'am."

Cold. Mai felt cold at that moment. A long time ago she stopped questioning orders given to her and their tactical relevance to the survival of humanity. All she knew was that she did her orders well, and as long as there had been someone to order her, to keep her busy, she was unbothered by what those orders really meant.

She had killed for so much, and for so little, and didn't even care why. That was the reality of her existence, and it felt cold. Now it was put into words, and she so desperately wanted their transportation to hurry up.

"I wish it ain't so." Shepard agreed. "I wish it was different."

* * *

Saren Arterius fumbled by the loading dock of the main colony. Reports were that his forces were being pushed back at his transportation out of system was holding station, waiting for him. There was no time to waste. He hadn't cared however. Now down an arm, bleeding, hurt, stumbling toward a white Geth unit. "Set the charges! Blow this colony to oblivion! Leave no trace that we were here!" He screamed at it. It offered no response but the unit understood, scampering away as he stumbled toward the entire reason why he had come here:

The Beacon.

He shoved his stump of an arm into his stomach, trying to stifle the bleeding, before that marker of Prothean architecture and will.

"Show me!" He screamed at it. "Show me my path! Show me what I have to do!"

The Beacon emanated with this sickly green aura, almost like a mist, and as he screamed at it, the aura froze cold, surrounding him, taking him, holding him up and showing him what he wanted to see.

* * *

When they arrived, they arrived ready.

Kaiden was ready enough to go to the cylindrical case that had been beeping and look at it once. "Demolition charges! Geth must've planted them! I've got four wired on this network!"

"What happens if they blow?!" Shepard hadn't been given a breath to fully orient herself as Kaiden went to the wiring.

"This place will go up. We're right next to a geothermal deposit." Ashley answered urgently.

With one sweep Mai and JD found where they were: just another loading dock, this one attached to the colony. The sounds of warfare hadn't sounded that close since their time on Reach, but they were ready for it, scanning the walkways. "Permission to split off and cover more ground?"

The proposition by Mai had been well intentioned enough as Shepard looked at her wearily. "Take JD."

"On the move!" Mai had taken off, JD following behind her diligently. Only moments after they had gone out of sight the gunfire had started and the metal bodies, distantly, started dropping to the floor.

"SOF huh?" Williams had reiterated what they were, impressed almost as Kaiden disabled the bomb.

"That's what they tell me." Shepard followed up, looking to her omni for other paths of ingress that had led to the remaining bombs as tracked. Kaiden held his words. He knew better, but as far as he could tell those two had been brought in line.

There might've been a discussion about their nature, even in the middle of the Siege. The Geth had found them first in a squadron of more drones however, coming from where they came: back down the track.

"Get to cover!" Her voice cracked as she placed herself in front of the bomb. Better to hit her than hit the bomb she decided, laying her Avenger rifle on the railing of the station pointing out.

Williams and Kaiden had been caught out of cover, leaving her the only one to deal with the near dozen large formation.

She sucked in her breath as the pressure in her hands built up.

There were many biotics in that Galaxy, she among them, but even then it had been hard to describe the exact feeling that was elicited using, effectively, biotic abilities. She could hardly tell people what it felt to wield black holes in her hand, and, by some mystic property, aim with her eyes and throw them toward any targets. Weaponized biotic abilities hadn't been her forte, but she found a place for them when multiple targets were concerned.

She held one hand out, palm flat, before a great fire erupted from her hand, three drones quickly approaching crumpling and falling to the ground as that hand returned to her rifle's grip.

The drones opened fire at her, and she fired back, hardly a flinch. She shot, one trigger pull at a time, her aim refined by the need to be quick, and to kill faster. Misses she couldn't afford in her life. With every twitch, every gradual adjustment of her arm, a drone had gone down.

She couldn't down them all however.

The final surviving drone had crashed into her like a car, at her head, claws and drills emanating from its belly, aimed at drilling into her head. Her left hand had gone right onto said drill, threatening to put a hole into her visor, the heat of the metal spinning stopped by her armor's gloves. The amount of torque behind it burned her palm but it kept her un-lobotomized, her teeth grit as her right hand found the pistol at her hip, shoved almost to eye level at her.

A great flash of white was had, but the drone was off her, a hole in its body and now at the floor as she backed off, only to open fire into it again, making sure.

When she looked up she had only seen Williams and Kaiden pointing their guns at her. A moment and then she understood: they were going to take the shot at the drone at her head but didn't.

Probably good for her health.

She noticed the chips in her visor, her helmet now unusable, throwing it off.

"We good?!" She rasped in a yell.

"Affirmative Commander." Kaiden answered.

"Let's move then!"

* * *

Testing her enemy. It was almost scientific: how Mai had let the Geth hit her with energy pulses and mass effect based weaponry just to see how her shields handled it. It was an odd thing to see to JD, to see her shields flicker before she got back into cover, eventually becoming comfortable enough to simply walk out, take what fire she could, and lay it down. All eyes were on her, which gave him ample time to open up behind her with his SMG.

The rattle of his gun sent a Geth over the railing of the balcony they were on, he having just defused a bomb with Alenko's protocols. He used her for cover, falling into her form as she measured herself steadily, letting her shields recharge between periods of walking fire. Every time she stepped out at least two metal bodies had hit the ground. She was death incarnate on a casual level, uncaring of the incoming fire to a point that it allowed her flexibility to put time on target.

She was both the shield and the sword, her DMR burning a hole through any resistance as the Geth did nothing but push forward into her: a grinder of gunfire.

"Just disabled a bomb, Commander. We're approaching the geothermal stations." He spoke for Mai as she breathlessly drilled five rounds into a Geth trooper, her hand going back, almost protectively, to JD as she had moved them both into cover.

She waved one finger at him before pointing it toward the cover he had been blocked the view of. One contact. He could deal, popping out, trigger depressed as his SMG peppered the cover, and then the torso of that artificial being.

"Copy all. Converging on your position. Be advised one bomb left active."

"Hard copy. Out."

The Geth had dropped to the floor as Mai reappeared in front of him, finding stairs down and to the left, out of the loading station.

Their objective stared at them in the face as Mai had balled her fist, taking a knee, minimizing her form in the stairs. JD got the message as he froze and looked at the platform they had come upon: an object that screamed of the ruins they found earlier had been before them.

"Eyes on objective."

"Copy all. We're moving due west onto the platform. Check fire."

Over the radio they could hear Shepard's team move in, finding the last bomb and disarming it as they put down hostiles, but there had been a pause, and then an almost painful uptick in static.

_"All militia forces this net! Comms have been reestablished! All units say status!"_

"Sounds like local forces are getting in gear." JD commented, still basically hiding behind Mai's armored form.

"Bout time." It was an unkind comment, but JD knew the snark. Local militias, heroic as they were, often got in the way. He peered out in the distance down the platform, spotting the rest of his team pushing fast and forward. Any Geth left on that platform had immediately oriented toward them, the firefight starting and starting hard. Mai wrapped one arm around the front of her rifle, cradling it, creating a perch as, at once, she opened fire from behind.

Getting shot in the back was the same, in both organic and artificial terms, the white fluid that had erupted from gunshot Geth painting the floor.

JD had put a fist to Mai's thigh, tapping it, gun up and moving on his own down to apply more direct pressure.

"Check fire." Mai had spared a breath to speak. "Chief Durante's moving toward you."

Shepard had pushed forward poking around the corner only to dodge a bullet from a Geth shotgunner, the spherical rounds from the plasma shotgun it wielded giving her milliseconds to push out of dodge as she heard another biotic wrap reality: Kaiden found said Geth, lifting up above the crate cover only to be lit up from below by Shepard.

The Geth were unprepared for JD to push on them, but their numbers were thinning, not enough to cover all sectors.

One was able to turn on him however out of cover, but JD had been faster on the trigger, the momentum of his shots pushing the Geth up against the cargo crate it was using as cover, only for it to jerk to the right: It had been Shepard pushing rounds into its sides as Williams and Kaiden pushed up. The heat they all felt was obvious: red magma emanating from a geothermal plant's field, the platform overlooking it.

"Clear!?"

"Clear!"

"We good!"

The team reconvened again, four bombs down, the city secured for the moment. Their objective right before them in all of its arcane glory.

"This it?" Shepard tipped her head at the object. Williams affirmed, but skeptical.

"Yeah… wasn't like this when they dug it up though."

"Long as we can move it," Shepard told herself, hand to ear and initiating comms. "Normandy. Hitman 1-Actual. Package is secure, say status."

A few moments passed as the message went out, further human comm chatter from organizing defense units reassuringly joining.

Kaiden and Williams approached the active beacon, ancient electronics lighting it up, humming. It gave JD and Mai private time, JD throwing his index finger up and flicking. The Spartan had given something of a smirk behind her visor. He really was going to try out Spartan Signs.

"Ever see anything like this? Back home?" JD asked, motioning toward it.

_"This is amazing! Actual working Prothean technology. Unbelievable."_

Mai had looked to the beacon, considering her words carefully, as if there had been an ONI agent around the corner. It was easy to send a dead woman walking on classified ops, her guarantee of secrecy was the fact that she was to die soon. As Spartan B312 that was her fate, thrown to ops that let her grace the secrets of the Galaxy.

"Yeah." Was what she said. JD waited for a follow up, but nothing came. He rolled his head from side to side. Fair enough was written in his shoulders.

Curiosity killed the cat however. Just as much as it had been about to kill the two Marines who leaned in forward to the beacon as Shepard waited on comms from the Normandy.

"Normandy here." It was Joker. "Read you clear. Seems like the other Marines were able to lift the comm blackout. We're gonna push toward the colony now, give us a landing zone when you can."

"Roger, Normandy. Standing by."

Shepard's thoughts were filled with what she assumed was the free time she had on the ground. Perhaps she could've linked up with the rest of her Marines and the local defense and secure the area, or perhaps push back out to the outskirts to go hunt down the Geth. They were wiped away however when she saw her two Marines step forward toward the Beacon and it, like a tripwire, sprung in a green display that, to anyone, looked like it was dragging them in.

Without a word she had dashed toward the two at a diagonal, tackling them out of the way as the same force that had taken them took her instead.

Before JD could even turn his head to see what was wrong Mai had burst out in a sprint, emulating Shepard as the woman's feet left the ground and two Marines had been on the ground. Latching onto her arm, Mai planted her two feet.

A tug of war, and Shepard had been the rope.

Magnetics boots had activated and Mai had, stubborn as a stone, stood her ground as Shepard was lifted up, off her feet.

The Spartan wouldn't let go however.

It was the paneling below her that gave out first as JD, and the rest of them for that matter, saw a Spartan get lifted airborne.

"JD!" Mai screamed her name as Shepard levitated, as if an offering, toward the beacon.

His hands went to his belt and the paracord immediately, the best idea he had as simple as it came. He threw one end of the cord at her and she had caught it, now strung between Shepard and JD's rope. Wrapping it around his fist and arm there was only one thing he could do with all his might.

He pulled against fate and destiny itself.

* * *

What she saw had been horrible. She saw the destruction of a million cultures, of flesh pulled apart in the name of metal toward an abstract question that could not be answered unless a billion billion souls were sacrificed.

Harvesting.

**Reaping.**

A hundred thousand wars played by her mind and the bodies that had counted up had become realized by her: on every planet, in every system, of every star, the planets themselves were built on the bones and the ashes of an uncountable dead.

This was an ancient prophecy that was supposed to play out, and it was a prophecy that she could not comprehend. Not then. Not now.

But there was something else. There was another horrible image given to her, caught between two beacons of information that held secrets of lives not her own.

It was the other vision that she could process make whole, as, in reality, her head was thrown back as she went spread eagle against the sky, an armored woman trying to pry her away as her equally mysterious shock trooper fought against forces unknown.

Her mind was more accommodating of this vision:

It was human at least, blinking herself to consciousness in a place not known to her.

It was dark. It was night. It was muggy and it smelled.

New York? Los Angeles?

No, she opened her eyes, seeing nothing but a dark alleyway and backstreet left decrepit by industrialization.

Something, in the back of her mind, told her it was not a city she knew. That this wasn't a planet or colony she knew.

It was an unfamiliar city. One unlike she had ever seen save for the dystopian imaginations of a future that had come to life. The streets dark and dirty, the buildings above used and used for every purpose imaginable as cars, actual cars, drove past. Was she in the past? She thought it so.

Her boots, she thought she was wearing boots, were wet, the sewer system having risen up due to pressure.

Why did she know that the local workers union that dealt with utilities were on strike? Why did she know that those workers were mostly Hindu and were at odds at the Jewish government in that municipality?

She was given information and it hurt her head so, wobbling, finding the side of a building in that street and feeling cold steel instead of the familiar glass of Alliance colonies.

A headache came over her. Still contesting with the vision prior to this one: of the Leviathans come from beyond the stars.

She saw two figures in the dark of the night, barely lit by the neon of the lights. It was raining, further misting their forms as they, slowly approached. A woman, and… a smaller figure. A child?

She reached out to them. "Hey! Miss! Ma'am! Can you help-"

Her voice made no sound as if she lost it, she struggled to call out, but nothing came. As she clawed at her own throat, trying to get something as simple as air out.

Nothing.

The pair didn't notice her, even as she approached creakily, their details more apparent.

The woman, she seemed familiar, her head hung low. Her face had been bony, malnutrition having written her nearly dead. Shepard didn't know if she could bear to look at the child, but she did. It was the same story. These two had been in poverty, rags covering them.

She didn't need there help, they needed hers. There were just halfway down the block when again she tried to call out to them, but her voice was drowned out by the rushing sound of a van to her side, pulled up fast and hot next to them.

What she saw next she didn't think happened anymore. Sickly and frail the woman could do nothing as black cloaked men stepped out of the side door of the van, pushing her away and separating her from the child.

The woman's eyes went wide, the whitest thing in that dark place as she screamed and finally spoke, her daughter too weak to do anything but be scooped up by one man and brought into the van.

She spoke Arabic. _**"Don't take her, please, she's my daughter, take me instead!"**_

Shepard stood witness to this. That's all she could do as her blood froze cold and realized she was witness to a kidnapping in process. A nightmare underway as one of the men in black drew a syringe and, without hesitation, jabbed it into the woman's neck as she was thrown into the alley, the crash of a dumpster heard.

The child disappeared into the van, and in less than fifteen seconds that would've been it.

That's when the men in black looked at Shepard, pointed to her, and wanted her gone for being witness.

When they broke out running toward her, arms out, all she could do was run away. Run away into the sprawl of _New Jerusalem_.


	11. 1-5: Metal and Flesh

A/N: One thing before you read this chapter: If you haven't, go watch Combat Evolved: Anniversary's 1st Terminal, it'll explain a few things. Anyway, here's a hot and heavy chapter... right after these author's notes.

_**For those of you confused on the ending of last chapter**_: Well it's explained this chapter, but generally, Mai holding onto Shepard might've... screwed something up.

**For those of you who pointed out lack of polish and editing: **I lack a beta reader for the obvious reasons of "hey this chapter is longer than 80% of the fics on this website". But even then, I do try my best to catch stuff. I apologize for the rough sheen, and I'll keep it at the top of my mind from now on since a lot of you pointed it out. Do keep in mind I do have this very frank or... well, I don't know how to describe it but Cormac McCarthy-esque style of writing. It is, inherently, rough and conversational like, but I know, it's not an excuse, I promise to do better from here on in.

enji-benjy said "_**Also, if the Reaper can 'jam' a video camera, then it can also jam all of their weapons and armour, along with any other electronics within range."**_

-Yeah this is one of those things I have to reconcile with plot holes that exist in Mass Effect 1. I just have to assume there exists a reason why Shepard didn't record her talk with Sovereign, or even Harbinger in ME1 and 2. Clunky, but it's something I have to lampshade.

_**D72 - **_Thanks for all the reviews! And good music ambiance, I made the decision not to pick and choice ambient tracks for this story as I do in my other big one, but I might, from time to time, hint hint nudge nudge people to listen to a song while reading.

**Mkoll312** said "_**As an S3, B312 would have been an orphan created by the Covenant war.**_"

-I do have an explanation for this, but it involves a spoiler. It's a question I'll tackle around the halfway point of ME1.

_**On Nihlus being alive**_: Isn't there another character in ME canon that, via injuries, ends up in a coma and yet still, somehow, is able to communicate to the player? And haven't I drawn Andromeda in A LOT in this story already? Really makes you think huh.

Thanks for all the reviews, please enjoy!

* * *

** _Section 1-5_ **

** _Metal and Flesh_ **

* * *

In another universe…

He made it count. That was the promise he made to Noble Six, to every Spartan on Reach, to Reach itself, as the light faded from him on that landing pad, the Package cradled in his arms as the last remaining Noble in the area screamed in his infernal rage for all time with the MAC Gun, covering the dusty shipyard.

The last thing that Jorge-052 had done, after stabbing a Brute Chieftain in the back and tanking a Gravity Hammer in the chest, his lungs sucking blood, was to roll on his back, take his helmet off, and lay the Package to stand as the Pelican came closer to land, and to acquire it.

Reach was about to fall, and like that, the Spartan that had been born on that planet fell as well, a tank of a man left spread eagle on plasma scorched metal, the shadow of the Pillar of Autumn casting over him as its Captain arrived in that Pelican. The blue light of the Package was a Beacon.

Captain Keyes had seen many a dead Spartan in the last few weeks. His ship had taken on one, thrown her into cryo for her sake. It was pain to see humanity's best fall, but it did not pain him as much as it did-

The Pelican had hovered, bay open and its lip extending to allow his Marines to disembark and secure the perimeter around the Package and the body of 052. He would be the one to step out, to acquire it, but a large hand had extended in front of him, an arm barring him to not do so.

This was his burden now, the giant man in his armor walking out, MA5B in hand and slowly, respectfully, reaching out toward not the package but the dead Spartan. His eyes were wide open, staring up at that stormy sky and the war that had come to Reach, his home. It was tragic that he died like this: as his planet fell.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. Keyes had come out much to the dismay of his security detail, the humming sound of Covenant Phantoms nearby.

"They'll be remembered."

He was a Spartan. A II.

The greatest of their kind.

It meant that he had to see those he had called family die before him and it gave him no end of sorrow. It didn't feel right twenty years ago, it didn't feel right now.

He softly shook the Captain's hands off as he palmed the blue package. He knew who this was, and hopefully she would forgive him for not saying hi then and there. Not when Jorge was there, dead before him. The Package was handed off, the Captain retreating back into the Pelican as the MAC gun roared, Covenant bogeys being downed by a Spartan that the titan of a man didn't recognize.

Though it didn't matter, not as he hooked his arms beneath Jorge's giant form and lifted him up. The weight of the world was in his arms.

"I'm sorry, Chief."

John-117 said nothing as he looked to the clouds, the menacing mass of a Covenant cruiser breaking through. Keyes had seen it too as he had held down his comms, speaking to the Spartan on the MAC Gun.

"Covenant cruiser vectoring in to intercept us! We need cover now!"

"You'll have your exit." The voice grated at him back from the MAC Gun.

"We need to go Chief." Keyes had ushered him onboard, the mass of Jorge along his back and set down in the Pelican. It was by his weight alone that the Pelican had hardly shifted when the sound of a plasma cannon too near for safety echoed over their right, the sound of their escorting Pelican taking the hits and falling over into the ravine below.

"Evasive!" The pilot of the surving Pelican screamed out, the men inside thrown against the wall in their dodging.

The Master Chief had been ready with his MA5, poking back out the end of the bay, only to see that Phantom pass them over and head to the MAC gun that was providing them support, depositing a squad of troopers, one that had been happy to scramble over the gun and its occupant. A single Elite had gone over the glass canopy, but the affair exploded from its chest, glass and guts going with a shotgun blast.

Out from it: a sight he had never seen before.

A Spartan he hadn't recognized, his boot on the neck of the still alive Elite, his head wearing the face of death itself.

"I'm ready!" Shotgun blast to the face and the Elite was without its head, emerging out of his glass canopy like a casket. "How about you?!"

The ignition of an Energy Sword was too fast for John to do anything but watch as the blade came in from the back through that Spartan, impaling him whole, but not killing him, the last fight left in him screamed out in rage and fury as he took the kukri mounted on his shoulder and turned it around on the Elite that would kill him.

The MAC gun went silent, and the cruiser was still coming.

Vaguely, he had a thought, that he should've been left behind, to take up that mantle on the MAC gun and made sure the Autumn got out of the shipyard. He did take a step out, scooping up Jorge's machine gun into his own arms and getting ready.

"Chief! Don't go!" Keyes had yelled out to him as he had made his peace.

He turned around. "The Package is secure and the Autumn needs cover." In his deep voice, there was finality.

His finality wouldn't be today however. "The Package was meant for you, Chief! You're mission critical!" Before John could protest Keyes had been on the comms again. "This is Captain Keyes of the Pillar of Autumn on priority tasking from CENTCOM. Request Nomad Flight Contingencies!"

"_This is Colonel Holland to all, I back up that request. We need the Autumn escorted out of system now!"_

Taking one last glance at the MAC gun perched over them, hearing the death cries of Covenant and man, the Master Chief damned his training, his upbringing, his adherence to orders.

In another life, in another history, he might've discovered what it meant to follow orders, and, consequently, what it meant to go against them. In another life he would go AWOL, commit treason even, in the name of the Package that Jorge and his Noble Team all sacrificed themselves for. What he stood for and what he fought for were two different things. He wouldn't know that yet though, hauling Jorge's machine gun with him as he back pedaled into the Pelican, roaring to escape back to the safety of the Autumn even as the Covenant cruiser approached.

John-117 followed orders, and if he was deemed mission critical, he would have to live with it as he returned to the dark of the Pelican bay with the rest of Keyes' guard and Keyes himself, and awaited their salvation.

* * *

Supreme Commander of the Fleet of Particular Justice. That's what he was.

For a planet as important to the heretic humans as Reach, there was supposed to be several fleets there. In fact, he wasn't supposed to be the only Supreme Commander there at all. His compatriot would've been the Supreme Commander Rho Barutamee, Shipmaster of the Long Night of Solace, Fleetmaster of the Fleet of Valiant Prudence who also presided over lesser Fleet Master Seylu Karonee and her support flotilla.

Barutamee however had blown the Solace's cover early, and the UNSC, as is usual in their devilry, had been able to destroy both the Solace and its surrounding support. Karonee had been killed in the Slipspace Rupture too, presumably, leaving only adjuncts and second-in-commands in charge until Particular Justice had arrived and ascertained the situation.

So, the Supreme Commander of the Fleet of Particular Justice, Thel Vadamee, had now presided as the single commander responsible for leading Covenant forces over their greatest victory in that decades long war.

But, now, on that day, across that entire planet on fire and in the process of being Glassed, he had focused on what the humans had called the Aszod Shipbreaking Yards.

His long cloak hid the ways his arms crossed, his claws dig into themselves as an overzealous shipmaster moved his cruiser too near to that last human ship, about to launch and take flight probably away. It had been reported that there had been anti-ship defences in the area, but they had fallen silent, and for that Shipmaster's arrogance and impaitence he would be rewarded.

Admiral Vadamee scoffed, looking away from the holographic projection long enough to take gaze over the rest of the ship to ship combat engagements currently taking place.

"Fleetmaster!" One of his bridge officers yelled at him

"What is it?" He paid attention to.

"Human ships have begun disengaging enmasse from us! They're being rerouted to these coordinates apparently!"

"What?!"

Those coordinates had been-

The cruiser's weapons had been powering up to rake across that human ship, slow and steady, and if it hadn't been for the properties of plasma weapons needing to have power charged and diverted perhaps that human ship would've been destroyed.

Seconds were precious, and the human rail guns shot a measure far beyond the speed of sound. Which is why that cruiser took a massive ball of steel through its guts and, unceremoniously, began its explosive fall.

All over Reach human ships had been disengaging, even at their own expense, all turning tail and in one final effort, pointed themselves toward Aszod.

Even his CAS ship, his very own flagship, could do nothing nestled away from battle.

Frigates, corvettes that had been able to evade the major engagements had all appeared on the horizon of Aszod as the last of the human cruisers and battleships were quick to divert along a very specific path.

"Are we picking up any of the human transmissions?!" Admiral Vadamee had yelled out to his electronic warfare operator.

"Yes! It says-"

"Just play it!"

The bridge broke out in a cacophony of man, human language and tactical chatter filling. If the humans had broken communication code and used unsecured channels then this was truly a desperate play at something. A something so sinister it burned Vadamee's nose painfully, looking back at the hologrpahic projection of Aszod only to see that human ship take off and begin its ascent into atmsophere.

"_This is Captain Keyes our tactical AI will be assigning you designations and formation planning! Fall in line and give this ship a clear escape corridor!"_

"_We're abandoning Reach?!" A human captain yelled out in protest._

"_Reach is lost, and so will the rest of humanity if we don't deliver this Package!"_

A human female voice rung out across the bridge, calm and almost even collected. It was the voice of someone who knew what she was doing.

"_This is __CTN 0452-9, all ships be advised you're coming with us. We need defense pickets along this route, sending assignments now. Please transfer to secure comm channel Delta-7 and use the security protocols as uploaded to your CIC. __**Cortana**__ out."_

All human comms had went dead, covered by their security protocols. It would take minutes to crack again but they didn't have that time.

That one human ship had risen from the atmosphere of the planet, in the range of only the fewest of Vadamee's frigates. When humans flee'd they usually had no destination. That was the point. Their homeworld would not be found by such randomness. By the way this human ship however had been flying, their destination was clear and their flight was backed by at least a dozen ships.

More had been on the way as a wrecking ball Vadamee had hardly seen before formed. He could, just barely, see it out the viewport of his ship.

Two could play at this game.

"Gather all ships! Their planet has been given up! We must give chase!"

Admiral Vadamee's orders were clear as his fleet lifted off from Reach and whatever they were pre-disposed with, the Autumn's battlegroup vectoring away from the system.

The battle that followed would be filled with heroism on the human's account, and savagery according to the Elites. Ships, civilian ships even, throwing themselves in the way of Covenant cruisers and carriers in order to cover the Autumn. That was the urgency that had befallen the Autumn given its escalated attention to when it dusted off. Mangled ships of both UNSC and Covenant making a debris field that denoted battles ten times as long in a mere ten minutes time as the Autumn, successfully, found its Slipspace route and jumped, leaving behind a trail of destruction in its wake.

The Autumn didn't leave alone that day, the hail mary of the last of the Reach defense group coming with her into the final battlegroup of the UNSC in that system, all trying to make a desperate play at whatever Halsey's package had led them. Inadvertently, it also drew the Covenant away. Not all, but all those predisposed with Glassing. Half the planet was on fire and on its way to glass, but that was that: only half as defenders found a new breath of air, Admiral Vadamee disappearing suddenly into Slipspace chasing after the Pillar of Autumn with most of the Covenant naval forces in play.

The humans had a better deck of cards when it came to the ground, and the Battle of Reach never outright manifested into the Fall. In the words of another Halsey: They found Halo, unlocked its secrets, and shattered the enemy's resolve. But perhaps Noble Six was lucky to never find out how humanity achieved their victory, without her.

Two weeks later, emerging from Slipspace, Keyes had asked the Package this on the bridge of the Autumn, now the flagship of a rag-tag fleet of refugees from Reach: "Cortana, all I need to know is did we lose them?"

They looked at that object in the distance, at that Ring. They certainly weren't in Kansas now.

The purple AI smirked though. This was her creator's plan all along. "I think we both know the answer to that sir."

Four days after that, a comm buoy had been returned from the Autumn to Earth:

"TOP PRIORITY: END OF WAR IN SIGHT. SEND SHIPS TO RENDEZVOUS AT THESE COORDINATES. WE HAVE BECOME DEATH. DESTROYER OF WORLDS. -C"

* * *

Williams and Kaiden had been quick on the draw as they slid their butts back on the cold steel floor, trying to get away from the beacon that threatened to take them moments before. They were on their feet fast, dashing toward JD as he dug his heels into the floor as best he could and tried to tug Shepard and Mai back.

There was no need though, not when a bright flash surrounded them all with an electrical pop.

The beacon exploded in sparks and fire, metal seemingly evaporating as, all at once, it let Shepard go and the two that had been lifted fell to the ground. Mai wasn't the softest thing to land on, but she landed on her nonetheless as she went limp. JD flew back, the tension gone, also on his ass as he quickly shouldered his SMG. The sound of Mai hitting the ground had been heavy with a metallic thwak, her mass not giving her any benefits in the situation.

"Mai!" It was the loudest JD had spoken that entire mission. She was fine, barely feeling the fall as she rotated into a sit, holding Shepard in her arms as she laid her out.

She could see the bulge of her eyeballs behind closed eyelids. They were frantic, alive. Whatever she had been seeing had called her entire self into it.

"JD!" She called for him.

"We good?" Kaiden had assumed command, it was how the hierarchy right as Shepard's form was seen by all: out cold. "We good?!" He yelled again.

"Up!" Williams kicked asides pieces of debris from the Beacon, steaming from their explosion away from Shepard. JD and Mai did not respond as they attended to Shepard and JD got to work, flaring his omni-tool, his gloved hand opening Shepard's eye and finding the woman's eyes tracking a dream.

He looked up to Mai as he took a kneel, tipping it once. Out of his workspace, he said non-verbally. Mai had abided, holding her rifle tightly snapping around to Kaiden.

"You." Her words had cut into Kaiden's ears like the reaper come for him. That was what it felt like when she approached him, freezing in his place as someone he was technically supposed to have authority over took command. "Did that thing react to your biotic abilities? To Commander Shepard's?" She spoke fast, low.

He could only roll with it. "I don't know. I don't know if I did anything, all I did was step toward it and it just-"

"Okay." That was all Mai needed to here. "Can you call for the Normandy for an medevac? I'll secure the area."

Mai had moved off back, looking out toward the city, her intention clear.

"Hold position, Chief Gul." It was an order, and like she was a computer she took a knee without thinking.

Kaiden was impressed. For someone so imposing she was wound tight, her leash short. He was expecting dissent but none came as Mai sucked in her breath and stood, glancing to JD over Shepard. Orders were orders.

"We need to stick together. Hold this position."

"Aye sir." Mai responded flatly, Williams swearing to hear her teeth grind.

"This is Hitman 1-1 to any Hitman or Normandy units on this net. I repeat, Hitman 1-1 to all contacts on this net, come in."

_"This is Normandy Actual,"_ It was Anderson. _"What the hell happened down there Lieutenant?! Where's Shepard?"_

Kaiden looked to JD and Shepard, the shock trooper busy trying to diagnose his new commander frantically. It was frantic, but measured. He'd trained for this, to stop losing comrades. That was the desperation in JD's hands as his entire being shook and his helmet fogged up behind the visor.

_No, no, not again. Not here._

He got the front plate of her armor discarded as he unrolled some purpose tubing, his helmet off. The stethoscope he had went into his ears as he pressed down over her heart and lungs.

"Speak JD, what do we got?" Kaiden wanted the status report, but he got none.

The shock trooper had not spoken more in his life than he had in the last three weeks, ever since he came here. He was unused to the tick, the trigger, of people expecting him to speak. At least in the ODST Corps the 'strong but silent type' was respected. He was one, or, at least, assumed to be one. It gave him breathing room as silence tugged at his throat.

"Chief Durante!" Kaiden almost yelled at him.

"It- it." He started stammering, stethoscope out of his ears. "She's fine!" He croaked.

That was a lie but it was the words he had been able to muster on the spot. Nothing was life-threatening it seemed, no shrapnel from the Beacon exploding had come about into her, she wasn't having a seizure and, although elevated, her breathing and heart rate was at the moment within tolerable limits. He could've said all of that, but words escaped him as again he went to her eyes and looked in.

Kaiden couldn't spare any time for this. _"Shepard is incapacitated and the package has been terminated. Request immediate MEDEVAC and dust off. How copy Normandy?"_

"_What?! The Beacon is destroyed?" _Anderson's surprise bit at them all.

"It self-terminated sir!" Kaiden waved one arm out to the air. "It nearly grabbed Shepard before it went!"

"_What do you mean, Lieutenant Alenko?"_

Kaiden struggled to replay the last thirty seconds in his head. He felt the Beacon draw him in, tearing at his skin, like a black hole.

"Sir, forgive me, but I'm gonna have to debrief in person."

"_This is Hitman 2-Actual, reading you clear Hitman 1-2. What do you need?"_

It was the rest of the Normady's Marines. Based on how clear the message was they were close. "This is 1-1, regroup on my position, we're exfiltrating."

"_A lot of work left to do down here sir."_ Emerson responded over the net, obviously not pleased with leaving a colony still in the thick of it.

"We have our orders."

"_...Copy all. Oscar mike. Out."_

The mark of the battle in their wake had been left on Shepard, dust on her face, scrapes and burns on her armor from taken hits and kinetic barrier fizzing. It was unkind, but she was relatively untouched, physically. JD had done a quick pat down of himself making sure if that was also the case, still not used to the sensation of having a shield save him. He had been okay though, if not frantic.

This was what he trained for, what he so desperately wanted to avoid: dead comrades.

But he could do nothing as the damage, if there had been any, was internal.

All he could do was monitor her brain activity on his omni-tool until, over the wall, they heard the rumble of a mass of Marines.

They came from where they did, albeit lugging something that had no right being in this area: hopping in on its jump jets.

"Bring her in Loke." The man in front had motioned to the hovering Mako.

It was Hitman: coming up and waving off the rest of them, clearing a space for the Mako to set down. When it did the platform they were on waned, but held.

Emerson had arrived, missing his beret, taking Kaiden's hand in a curt shake. "How you doing, Ell-Tee?" The Marine glanced down at Shepard. Th question was rhetorical.

"Better now that you guys are around. How was the colony?" Kaiden composed back.

Emerson shrugged, looking to Mai and JD intently before putting his rifle onto his back, idle. There was no more threat to them at least. "Nothing we haven't done before."

Kaiden rolled his head once. "Yeah, and here I was a little upset my Marines got swapped out with you guys last second."

"You hurt me." One last time he had glanced down to Shepard before signaling for one of his men. "We have a combat doc with us. Real nifty guy." Emerson and his team finally made contact, within arm's reach, the Normandy's ground teams reunited. The Mako, in its hopping, had as gingerly as it could (not at all), set down next to them all.

The Recon Marine had signaled for a bald man, bereft of any headgear, move over to Shepard motioning for JD to move away. "Not actually a combat medic. But I was a doctor." He stated plainly, calmly, looking down onto Shepard as everyone had. "I hear you're an actual one."

"In process." JD said fast, the Combat Doc kneeling besides Shepard before waving an omni-tool coated arm over her. The same readings. "Applied anything?"

"Adrenaline. 10cc's. Tried to get her out of it first, no response." JD rattled off. "Unconscious, high brain activity, would advise against anything else."

The Combat Doc agreed with a nod, taking his thumb to Shepard's eyelids and opening them. Her eyes were wild, every which way, her body tossing and turning in an experience of its own. "What happened?"

JD didn't say but the combat team's eyes drifted to the broken monument, the broken beacon, hissing before fizzling out entirely like a fire, a flame. "Electrical?" He asked again.

JD shook his head along with the rest of Shepard's team. "Radiation, maybe, but that beacon it pulled some of us toward it… Grabbed us."

"Grabbed you?" Bannon, Emerson's apparent right-hand woman, asked aloud, incredulous. Mai had nodded as an answer.

"As if it was generating its own gravity, pulling us in… then it self-terminated."

Emerson looked at it, the feeling in his gut obliging him to ask. If it was classified he was now implicated in the mission, he had seen it after all, his Commander affected by it. "Was it your objective? The Turian's?"

"Affirmative." Kaiden answered.

"Where is he, sir?"

Shepard's team looked back toward the outskirts, hopefully Jenkin had been still alive, picked up. "He's in real bad, burnt to a crisp, hopefully with Chakwas now."

"Geth did that?"

Kaiden had would've shrugged if it hadn't been so casual in that situation, though he knew what Emerson was asking. Geth were not that cruel, that extra, as to impose that sort of disrespect onto an enemy. It served no purpose. Even those spires had been a means for reinforcement.

"Blue?!" Over their shoulders the ground team turned, seeing more humans peer over cover, down the ramp.

"Blue!" Kaiden shouted back, the brief momentary stress gone away as the Normandy team went at ease, now only concerned for their commander. It was the rest of the Eden Prime garrison, push through to them, surrounding the area and filling it in.

A Captain in the militia had spotted out the ranking man: Kaiden. "Captain Preston, Eden Prime Defense Force."

Kaiden could barely shake the man's hand as they got to business. "How's the rest of the colony?"

Mai had raised her rifle, ready to get back to it, but there was no need as the Captain calmed himself before filling them all in. "Pockets remain but we've got them getting picked apart. Good lot of them are self-destructing too, and we're gonna use these trams to deploy to the outskirts. You guys been through?"

Kaiden nodded quickly. "We met resistance out there but we also have some friendlies holding the fort. So the colony is clear?"

The Captain had been distracted halfway through Kaiden's words, hand motioning for his men to take the cargo trams out the same way Shepard's team had gone in. He processed for a moment before nodding again. "We're sweeping up now and interstellar comms are re-established. 1st Fleet is enroute."

A few of Hitman had clapped to themselves in self-gratification upon the word that 1st Fleet had been coming. If Shepard had been conscious, she would've made comment: It had been the fleet Alec Ryder had been assigned to.

"Do you have an active landing port for a frigate? We need to MEDEVAC ASAP."

"We'll toss you the coordinates now. Not staying around?" It was a tease, soldier to soldier with a battle going their way, obviously. Kaiden couldn't feel the same however, not with his new executive officer on the floor going nuts in her sleep. The Combat Doc had gotten paracord out, restraining her arms and legs as a stretcher from the Mako came out for her.

"We're giving chase, going to see what's the cause of this."

JD looked over to Kaiden. He doubted that. Not with a dead Spectre and a failed objective. He had never been, officially, personally been the cause of a mission failure. He was a good ODST like that, either the mission failed or the circumstances, but never him out of want to either live or to help his men, but even then, he was always called in to fill the blanks.

In a galaxy not at war, where raids like this were, supposedly, common, he figured more hearings would be in his future.

"Hey, Doc," Kaiden called out to the Combat Doctor. "She good for transport?"

Shepard was loaded into the Mako, Doc flashing thumbs up. "Sooner we get her to Chakwas, the better."

"We exfiltrating?" Mai sounded disappointed. It was a question that was an oddity. It was yearning in her voice, disappointment in all of them. She never left a battle without being forced to, without the all clear.

"Affirmative Chief."

"What about me?" Another Chief spoke to Kaiden. It was Williams, without a unit, without a command.

JD knew that feeling. For the UNSC at least, where unit destruction was an often thing, protocol was to fold units in with each other, commanding officer of rank taking charge and going on the fly. He was subject to it too many times. He bore himself as last survivor of a hundred different companies, units, battalions and ships, and he could only, only know all too well what Williams was feeling. She didn't deserve to be left behind.

"Who's this?" One of the Normandy's Marines asked. JD answered.

"Marines with Marines." He said softly, just loud enough for Kaiden to hear, but plenty loud for Mai.

Kaiden agreed, looking to her. "With us Chief Williams. We're taking you in for now, oorah?"

"Oorah." She answered back, heavy breaths.

His omni-tool rang, coordinates to the nearest dock highlighted. "Mount up, we're dusting off in five."

The colonial militia had gone off to the trams that they came here on, the time to get moving upon the Normandy's Marines.

"Full load." Williams had noted. Twenty people in one Mako, and even then, Mai had to count for five.

"It'll be fine." Was all Kaiden could say as he took a knee and awaited everyone to clamber into the back of the Mako, shoulder to shoulder. Mai struggled to fit, but it wasn't anything she hadn't been used to, JD on one shoulder, Kaiden on the other. Across from her on the other side of the Mako, knees barely not touching, had been Emerson.

Kaiden knocked against the steel wall as the back door was closed off, Shepard laid at all of their feet on her back, secured and restrained. He leaned to speak up to the front, a woman at the wheel. "Corporal Loke, is it?"

"Yes sir." The driver responded back.

"Get going."

"Aye sir."

Usually, Warthogs, renowned for their handling and their ability to bounce passengers around had hardened many a UNSC member. As the Mako accelerated, that familiar bounciness returned to them as they braced.

The verticality part of it was new, JD tightening his stomach as he felt the opposite of a drop.

Everyone else seemed to take it with aplomb however, a fact that Emerson had been immediately aware of. He and Hitman knew better however, a truth Mai read behind her helmet as Emerson rose an eyebrow at her, catching her looking at him.

"Why are you here?" It came out the same way one of her knives did, without remorse, without shame.

Hitman as a whole tensed up, but Emerson alone answered as Williams was left in the dark. "I think you know the answer to that, Spartan Mai."

They knew. Of course they did.

Kaiden, more than anyone, caught in between, knew what the implication was. "That wasn't communicated to me by Commander Ryder when he had you transferred."

Emerson clasped his hands together, "I'm sure you would've eventually deduced. You were there over Altis, Lieutenant, after all. You know what she can do."

They spoke in abstractions and vagueness, enough to keep Williams in the dark as she did her best impression of someone who hadn't been listening. She was, but for her sake she wanted to look like she hadn't been.

The eyes on the lieutenant had furrowed, a glare in it that he had to pack away. "This isn't the time or place for this discussion."

"We're still your men, Lieutenant Alenko, just know that we have priorities."

"Don't worry about me. Or him." Mai growled. It was that very growling, her reaction, that justified everything. She still sounded like an animal. Something that could break free from her shell and make everyone pay.

The Covenant was all-encompassing, everywhere. If not that: the human insurrections kept her busy, underwater with an enemy in each direction. To be delicate was not in her purview, and Hitman had been there to make sure, if she went astray, she'd be set in line.

Emerson's point was made as he leaned back, looking away.

JD had wondered, just vaguely, as he sat in Mai's shadow, if the UNSC, if ONI, had been like this with the Spartans. If the Spartans were indeed kids, developmentally incomplete human beings, who would they be without the distraction of the war? Would they have been fit to live among the rest of humanity? Killing was a failure of action. It was the failure of every other choice. Killing was failure. And yet that's what the Spartans were made to do: to act on base instincts that had no place in that modern world.

He thought of human nature, sometimes, more than he would admit. His father had been a detective, and thus those kinds of moral questions were aired at him as his father thought aloud on cases. Who were murders, serial killers, rapists and such but human? It was the only thing they could be. Mai was more than human however.

What that meant, at least to Ryder and his men, was that she was dangerous. Dangerous even amidst the complications of their mission to Eden Prime.

* * *

The Mako had rolled into the Normandy as it had, for barely half a minute, found its landing spot in a cleared agricultural field just asides from the main colony. It had taken off before the troops dismounted. Even before they had dismounted they found a glaring, if not concerned, Captain at the lip of their IFV. Flanked by Doctor Chakwas and some assisting personnel, there was no reprieve even in the safety of the ship.

Chakwas and several men had rushed to Shepard, being hauled by Doc and Williams, a fact that was immediately picked up on by Anderson as he did one sweep of the Marine crowd and saw him missing one.

He walked to Shepard before making comment, looking down at her. She was still breathin, but he had seen what had concerned them all: the way Shepard seemed so alive in her state, and yet so gone.

When he twisted around it was unkindly.

"Lieutenant Alenko?"

"Yes Captain?"

"Where's Corporal Jenkins? He wasn't there when we picked up Nihlus."

It was nice being XO. It usually meant most of the flak was taken by the COs. Unfortunately, his new one had been out of action and being carted away as they spoke, her head still thrashing back and forth, haunted by a dream.

He sucked in spit through his teeth as he unclasped his helmet and gave the answer that he had been only alerted of minutes before upon getting on comms and asking for Jenkins' status.

"Jenkins volunteered to be left behind with the colonists, assisting relief and SAR efforts. I made that call."

Anderson had glared at Kaiden for a moment before relenting. There were bigger issues to contend with then a soldier leaving his station for his home.

Jenkins stayed behind, and he was now currently fighting Geth on his homefront. Who could be blamed? JD had seen many ODSTs take that death sentence when the Covenant came to their home. He did not blame the man at least, but he could at least imagine Mai seemed annoyed. Anyone going against orders drew her disdain it seemed.

Anderson started back to the elevator. "Anyone who isn't an NCO or an Officer, to duty stations now. Everyone else with me to my quarters." Anderson had addressed that mass of Marines, and their blood had gone cold. Their mission had failed and, even given the circumstances, it was on them.

"I'm sorry Captain, but we get first ride." Chakwas had been at their knees, on her knees, hovering over Shepard like the medics before her. The Captain nodded in understanding as the good doctor rose her stretcher up with help, only now noticing who had been helping her.

"How are you doing you old goat." Doc had history with her. One that went back to med school. If anyone could talk like that in heated situations where lives were on the line, trained medical professionals could, she returning a smirk.

"Same age as you, Decker. Remember that."

"Yeah, and I'm the one out on the field. Anyway, up Williams, nice and steady. Don't need to be given her a concussion as well."

They handled her as if a coffin, her armor adding that weight. Shepard was in good hands however as they with WIlliams disappeared into the elevator and were sent up.

Distantly JD had let out a breath he hadn't known what he was holding. He could count the number of missions with zero casualties on his hand, so he stood there, like a stone, trying to process the battle that had come and gone. Not even the words of his new Captain could knock him straight.

"Alright. Then, come on."

He almost drew Mai's disdain as he stood in the hanger as those the Captain called on had walked with him to the elevator. It was rap against his knuckles with her own as she passed that clued him into something new: he was an NCO now. So he had rushed over, forgetting that his weapon was still in his hand, only to awkwardly drop it and let it fall limp against his chest by its sling.

Five people alone weren't enough to usually make that elevator cramped, but with Mai it had been. The true tightness in all of their lungs had been in the atmosphere as, again, the Spartan felt the drift in her feet of the Normandy hitting FTL.

"I'm not mad at any of you. But you have to understand that this entire mission has turned into a disaster."

Emerson and Alenko had been up front, the two turning over as the NCO Marine spoke out.

"Sir, my mission taskings today were wholly unrelated to anything Lieutenant Commander Shepard tasked with her element."

"I understand that, Sergeant Emerson, but you're one of the first Alliance units to engage the Geth. Your debrief will be as important as the rest."

The entire elevator had caught that from Emerson. Had the man seriously trying to lift blame off himself? Even if his words had been true, it seemed... opportunistic.

The comms on the Captain's omni-tool rang. It was Joker. "We just hit the Relay, Captain. ETA on arrival thirty hours on current drift."

"Roger that Joker. Drop my status update on the next comm buoy you hit."

"Affirmative."

The elevator opened and Anderson had led his pack. There had been no window into Chakwas' sickbay, no way to see what had happened to Shepard or Nihlus. There stead was fast though, for there was something to do. For the first time no one had been overly curious about Mai walking on the ship, even in her armor, there were more familiar curiosities happening as the group came into Anderson's quarters and squared their forms. The second the doors behind them closed, it began.

"Now, tell me, what the hell happened down there?"

There was only one objective: secure the Beacon. They failed at that. The rest was context.

Anderson wasn't a hard-ass, at least, not unnecessarily so. No plan survived contact with the enemy but this situation it was just so out there that he had to treat this like a failure on his team's part. To grill them, to convince himself that the measure of what had been happened, and indeed still happening on Eden Prime, was correct.

"The Geth have something fierce for jamming." Anderson had said as they all wrapped up, for the third time, their overview of the mission, having stood there for two hours on their feet each explaining, corroborating. "Radio transmissions, visual feeds, scrambles all of our sensors. Running through your helmet cams, even yours, Chief Gul, Chief Durante."

A failure of cybersecurity and cyber warfare suites. Even MJOLNIR had its limits, not without an AI in her head. She preferred it, but what that meant was that all of their words was all they had.

They had to describe that leviathan of a Geth ship rise before them, give out its roar, and leave. They had to describe the feeling in their bones that whatever ship it was, the Geth had come for a reason with it. They had to describe the Husks that rushed at them, only cut down by extreme prejudice. They had to say those words then and there so they could say it to a galactic community to try and excuse humanity from a failure of galactic magnitude.

Humanity had dropped the ball, and it had been Prothean in nature.

"You sound hoarse, Chief Durante." Anderson called out his shock trooper. JD's voice had become ragged, the more he talked, damning the fact his BDU hadn't been wired with a hydration pack.

"I'm sorry sir."

An odd apology, one that Anderson immediately tried to wave off.

"We're done here for now," he sat his data pad down. "I know, even before this, this wasn't on any of you. You all performed admirably for a first away mission. I expect nothing less from any of you."

Anderson expected nothing less from the away team from another N7. He expected nothing less of Kaiden. Especially he expected nothing less, and yet was still surprised, by the performance of Mai and JD.

Each, in their own way, nodded or acknowledged.

"But you won't answer to me in the end. Not when Shepard was being vetted for Spectre status. Not when one Spectre is in comatose right now. That's why we're on the way to the Citadel." He paused. He had been pacing for that full time of debriefing, only now finding a chair and feeling that relief on his feet. The debriefing had lasted longer than the actual deployment. That clarity only made him realize that everyone there had been, either by circumstance or security clearance, from having been there over Altis, knew of the peculiarity of the man and woman that did not belong.

Ryder's Hitman Team, they'd been on the ground on Altis, they had helped apprehend Mai and JD. They knew that they were not Systems Alliance outright along with Kaiden.

It hadn't been revealed yet that the Covenant came from a different Milky Way through their FTL, implicating dimensional mistakes that resulted in the crossing of realities. It was known, generally, that their method of FTL had been the reason why for their stranding on Altis, but the nature of it was held. Known only to the Covenant themselves and the Admiralty of the Systems Alliance via those who handled the debrief of the ODST and Spartan.

Anderson saw Emerson and his weariness toward Mai, knowing that she did not represent humanity as he did, but if only he knew...

Even with this, he had risked saying this outright and probably displeasing Ryder. It was no doubt that Emerson would report back to him at some point.

"Chief Gul, Chief Durante, stay here with me. The rest of you are dismissed to your duties until we get to the Citadel."

Kaiden and Emerson bore salute, exiting out cleanly and leaving the still helmeted JD and Mai.

"Off with the cans, Chiefs." Anderson had sorely said. He hoped he hadn't come off as that strict.

Slowly, the two had taken off their helmets, the slick of their sweat curving their hair among the bowl of their helmets as they were slid off. It'd been a long day and it showed on their faces.

They both had had longer though, so they continued to stand.

A pause came and went, time to breath, decompress what they could as they smelled air unfiltered by their helmets.

"How were you two?" Anderson finally asked.

"Condition green, sir." Mai had answered first. Nothing more said. She had no other comment to have. They went over during the debrief that they engaged the Geth with "little difficulty". But what that meant without their own true context was nil. Anderson wanted them to say outright whether or not the Geth were unprecedented. That they were a challenge to them.

"Nothing I couldn't handle, Captain."

"I know." He responded back more than wise. "But please, just give it to me straight. Compared to the Covenant-" Mai's left eye twitched, and they all noticed. It was a question that she wasn't exactly prepared to answer, but had one. "Is there a particular threat to them that is alarming to you, is what I mean."

Mai stared straight ahead, just as she did for the last two hours. Only now did her vision shift, her eyes drifting down and to the right to look at Anderson. "Permission to ask a question, sir?"

"Granted."

"Why do you ask, sir?" She said softly, wearily.

"You know what it's like to fight an enemy that meant the end of the human race. Extinction. Help me understand the Geth through your eyes. If you're concerned, it will help the Alliance, the Galaxy, know what we're up against."

He knew it sounded inconsiderate, but there were no manners when it came to the tactical considerations of a war that seemed to be coming if the Geth would so openly attack an Alliance colony like this.

"I didn't want you caught up with this, of course not, but-" Anderson tried to find words. "Who would've thought that something like this would've happened? What were the chances people like you were to get caught up?"

Mai gave him what he wanted. At least Anderson had tried to placate. "Their shield strength was observed to have been underpowered compared to the average Elite I encountered in the field. Their individual capacity to act as a soldier, weary of threats and otherwise battlefield situations is… limited sir."

JD nodded in agreement. They didn't fight as hard as the Covenant. They fought, and they did pose danger, but they knew what death looked like in the face and it hadn't been the Geth. Death was a Hunter, throwing a Warthog against a barricade before tearing a man in two. Death was the shimmer of light, followed by the ignition of an energy sword through the heart of a grunt. Death was an alien empire who saw them as defiling their gods.

Not machines.

These machines they shot and killed and they were good with that. It was all in preparation and planning that would make the difference, and, perhaps, they both thought, that if the colony was prepared, they would've been able to fight they Geth off better than how they had.

An entire Marine unit, Williams, at the very least had been lost, and that was a failure of defense structure.

"They left…" JD started off. "The fact that they left meant either their objective in the area was completed or they didn't want to stick around due to reinforcements."

"I could've handled the rest." A declaration from Mai. One that surprised Anderson, but not JD. He knew exactly what Spartans were capable of. "From what I observed, if I had the support, I could've done it."

Six had made entire militia groups disappear.

That's what Halsey herself wrote about her.

Hyper-lethal, no matter where she was.

"That wouldn't be your mission, Chief Gul."

Her face had hardly shown any emotion. "But it could be given."

Who was she to do anything else? Not many UNSC Commanders fully understood, at first, what it meant to task Spartans on objectives. They always got the job done, death itself seemingly not in play when they were on the field. They approached the Spartans more as people, knowing of restraints that every SOF unit would have. That wasn't how they were best used however. Spartans lived to operate on that bleeding edge of human comprehension and capability. Only then did they change the war.

James Ackerson understood this. Colonel Ackerson, the very person responsible for the SPARTAN-III Program. She had been Ackerson's personal grim reaper, assigned to him for years, and he had used her appropriately: To kill those who would defy humanity's chance to survive the war.

He understood to use her as a Hyper-Lethal Vector and, secretly, she hoped Anderson, and if not him, someone else, would see it as Ackerson did.

"I'm not going to make you fight a war on your own, Chief Gul."

"But I can, for humanity." She had done once before. She would do it again now. She craved it. Needed it.

JD stepped in. The way this conversation was going, it wouldn't be something Anderson would be able to understand. Not if he was a good, decent man. "The Geth were nothing we couldn't handle sir. The only factor that we can't account for is there use of human bodies for weaponizing… those Husks."

"Yes," Anderson turned to his station and console. "We'll get reports back from Eden Prime soon enough on them… but it's reassuring that you weren't afraid." JD twinged at that thought. Of course he was afraid, but he had long known how to bury that emotion in the face of combat. "Any thoughts on Chief Williams? You two ran with her and seeing as Jenkins saw fit to stay on planet…"

"Acceptable. She operated well with us." Mai spat out, like a report. "She's a good soldier."

Again, JD nodded, but he had to say something else. "I'd… it'd be wise to support her, when we can. She lost her entire unit. It's not an easy feeling."

Anderson saw the flash of familiarity in JD's eyes. "Yes, of course. We will."

"Sir," Mai had cut in. "I'd like to inquire about the inclusion of Sergeant Emerson and the Marine Unit of Hitman on this ship. They have a close relationship with Commander Ryder and… we were not alerted that we'd have them overwatching us."

Anderson had risen one of his gloved hands to his chin, swiping at it before answering. He was as flabbergasted that it had happened as anyone else. "Commander Ryder ensured Prime Minister Shastri that he would take steps at curtailing you in the event that you would... Well, disobey orders. Naturally I said such precaution wasn't necessary, but the Prime Minister saw differently. He sent the order down to the Admiralty and thus Hitman was assigned to the Normandy."

"Is that their only goal?" A bit of grit had been in the Spartan's voice. "Watching me?"

JD stole a glance, noticing her wording.

"I communicated with Ryder about a week ago. Me and him have always had our differences, but he trusts me to not waste Hitman… and that means assuring Emerson and his men that you two aren't a threat. I'm sure you'd like that too?"

They both nodded, understandingly.

"Do they know then?" JD had slowly let out. "About who we really are?"

The whole, complete truth, it was known by a number of people: those who needed to know and those that had been in the room when they told their truths. Secrets never stayed hidden for long, and with the Covenant making moves to reveal their truth in due time, it wouldn't take long.

"They don't. They just think you were Cerberus or some human-supremacist rebels that we just brought back into the fold. If Hitman does know, Ryder breached confidentiality."

Again, the two nodded, but one person remained.

"What about Shepard?" Mai asked.

"If she asks?" JD followed up, making sure Anderson understood what was being asked of him if she woke up.

His face grew a stone-like composure. "Nothing has changed. Defer it to me. If she needs to know, she'll know."

"Why would she need to know?"

Anderson rose one finger meekly. "Nothing stays a secret forever. Especially not from Shepard. She's not that kind of person. _Especially after Akuze_." They both looked at him, expecting an answer. He gave one, looking to the medals he had used to decorate his desk, held in their own containers or frames. One of them had been awarded for his duties as an N7. Duties he tended to not like remembering. "You must understand that, as SOF yourselves, you must've had a certain amount of… freedom, in your deployments. The discretion to do what needs to be done."

There was a certain darkness in Anderson's words. One that belied a secret.

"Shepard… If she thinks something can be destroyed by the truth, she lets it. She dredges it up, she brings it to light, she fights for it, she-" Anderson cut off, not wanting to say what came next:

_She flies out with a N-Warfare Team to a human colony, waves down a sky car full of Cerberus personnel, and guns them down in the street._

JD knew what type of person that was. His father was that type of person, pleading with many a suspect, guilted in their own souls about what they done: "The Truth shall set you free." He would say.

"You're dismissed Chiefs."

The two, automatically, squared their feet, saluting. Anderson returned it, leaving the room immediately afterwards. The rigidness in their adherence, it was nice to have Marines that listened, he admitted, but not like that.

He breathed out stale air he didn't know he was holding in his lungs, head in hands. Much to do, much to think about, and not any time to take it in. He went to his omni and brought up comms to the medical bay.

"Doctor Chakwas?"

* * *

The Medbay was split in two, effectively. Each in the name of a patient. On one hand: Shepard, laying flat against a table, pads with wires coming out of them into appropriate instruments attached to head, monitoring her brain activity. She had come into that steel medbay relatively unharmed minus a few bruises and burns; her real troubles came within her head. That much Chakwas knew as one of her nurses sat by her, writing down notes.

"Strong one, she is." The nurse said. Chakwas could only nod. Shepard's record was written in commendations and combat. After Elysium she had gone across the borders of human space, saving those who needed saving, avenging those who needed avenging. Perhaps she wasn't as deadly as, say, Commander Ryder, or as effective a naval captain as Commander Anderson, but she had something that couldn't be quantified in words.

It was a force of faith: She cared in people, cared in her men and women, and everything that happened in a mission was based around making sure that the most good came out of it.

_"I don't enjoy it. Making that choice, deciding whether or not I have to take someone's life."_ Shepard said once on the Alliance News Network during an interview after Torfan. _"But if it came down to saving someone, anyone, 100% of the time I would do it. My life for yours."_

All that the nurses and Chakwas could do was let Shepard lay in the Medbay and let her run out her nightmares.

The other side of the Medbay however, it was much busier. It wasn't that operating and working on Turians was particularly difficulty compared to Human physiology, it's just that, on face, the Spectre Nihlus had no excuse as to why he had been alive in any capacity.

"Is he locked in?" Was one of the first questions that Chakwas wondered aloud as she had been put in a sterile suit and tried to tear his armor off of him where it had melted into his body.

Mercifully, Nihlus wasn't. As in he was still cognitive but unable to move his body: a prisoner in his own flesh. No, it was only a coma. Turians were a hardy species however. Not on the measure of a Krogan, but war had been in their nature. To survive it was natural to them.

He was more ash in the shape of a Turian than anything, crudely, almost like a piece of Jerky. But he was alive and his body was recovered.

His table had been surrounded by an erected sterile bubble, those operating on him trying to get pieces of shrapnel and metal out of his head wearing sterile work suits as if he was a HAZMAT-worthy object. Delicately, tweezers had poked into his head and gotten pieces of what they could only guess was shrapnel out of his skull and skin. Those in his brain needing Chakwas's attention to go at.

Shepard took priority however. That just how it was on a human ship, official or not. That was why the woman only stood over her anxiously.

She would eventually have to don a sterile suit again and head into that bubble to try and save Nihlus from anymore damage, but for now, Commander Shepard needed her eyes on her.

"Keep her restrained, but past that, I don't think we should do anything."

The nurse looked up at her, eyebrow raised. "Inaction kills, you know."

Chakwas could only caringly put her hand on the Nurse's shoulder. "So do mistakes."

_"Doctor Chakwas?" _Anderson rung her up on comms. She answered swiftly.

"Yes Captain?"

"How's the status on Shepard and Nihlus?"

She took another roundabout look at both of them.

Two Spectres, one a veteran, the other to be. Laid out in her Medbay with their lives held in her hand, both clinging on by threads. It was grim, and she hadn't even known what had happened to Shepard, but they were still breathing.

"We'll get them to the Citadel, Captain."

* * *

"That was Harvest, you know. _Harvest_." It was the first time Mai had heard JD stress a word: the name of that planet. Not Eden Prime, as the Alliance knew it, but what it was to them. He said this on the elevator down to the well deck and it surprised her.

"Was Harvest important to you?" She asked him.

It was important to all of humanity, he wanted to say. That was where the war with the Covenant began. _Of course_ it was important.

"No. But, it was still there. It looked like how it did before _it_ happened."

He looked at her but her face would not turn as the elevators door opened and the well deck was revealed back to them, still heavy with post-combat activities. Hitman had been there in force, gearing down, but many of them still held their pistols on their hips.

Some of them had taken cursory glances at them, some hadn't cared, but her presence was recognized as the well-deck froze, only to resume as Mai stepped in and proceeded to her locker and cot.

Her helmet had gone on, only to take a swig of water that had been in a bottle at her locker. JD had been more through, helmet off, followed by his BDU one by one, leaving him only in the rather damp remains of what had been his shipboard uniform in its rather utilitarian affair, blue, so much unlike the UNSC's green.

Only after he had wiped down with a towel had he noticed Mai not do anything to disrobe. Her armor remained as her helmet looked at him, expecting him to continue the conversation.

He asked with a gesture of the hand.

She shook her head. "No need." She could live for months in that armor, and had done so.

He could only shake his head at it, disapprovingly, before moving on. "How many colonies did you offer?" He said in his hushed breath, closing the door, going near her cot and sitting down besides it, against the wall, it tucked behind the Mako. It was more privacy than usual on a ship.

She had joined him, standing over him, her shadow cast over him.

"Really?" He asked softly.

She had stared at him, the connection in her head of what she had been doing to him clicking as she looked back at the general light fixtures above. She moved off a bit, but he had still looked at her expectantly. Moments, seconds, it took her longer than he'd like for her to get the point that he wanted her to sit down.

She gave him a lean as the Mako shifted against her weight. Good enough.

"How many planets did you give them?"

Mai racked her head.

"Several dozen." None too important. Most of them agrarian or relatively unimportant economically. The important thing was that they had been found and habitable. They were planets that she had gone to stomp out the Insurrection at, and she remembered them well.

"Reach? Chi-Rho? Harmony? Arcadia?" JD named the planets off the top of his head that he had been reminded of: important ones, ones that, if found, could expand human resource and control exponentially.

She shook her head and he knew why. It was dangerous to not have their bargaining chips.

"It'll take hundreds of years for the Alliance to know what we did." A future they would never see. But they weren't selfish. JD nodded in agreement. "We still owe ourselves to those worlds."

They owed it to battles that were never fought there, to a history never played out: one they alone remembered.

"We lost the war, didn't we?" A question that was still on their minds as they were on a ship, breaking through to a new one. JD asked because he needed to hear an answer. Mai could not give it though, and her face, if he saw it, could only see her eyes sink in. Everything she knew, everything that she could think of, it all pointed toward a loss beyond anything humanity would ever know.

JD knew they were losing. He wanted to know if it was lost.

"Why do you want to know?"

"I want to know if I would've died."

He wanted to know if he could've really, truly, began again here. Before he could start thinking of the Geth, of Shepard, of Normandy and the Galaxy, he needed to be given some sort of finality.

"It doesn't matter." Mai had barely said, leaning against the Mako so much more now. "War's not over."

It took JD a second to realize what she meant, but he did, eventually, to the distant planet of Altis. The warring parties might've been uneven; the Covenant might've declared peace with that Mankind, but they were not of that Mankind.

* * *

Saren Arterius stood before God, and begged for his life.

That's what the Matriarch Benezia had thought as the worse-for-wear Spectre floated in what she could only assume was some synthetic-bio-bath that would, in some measure, help him heal. The ship they were on, if they could call it a ship, was not meant for organics. Not meant for those to walk upon its insides, almost as if walking in its memories, in its mind.

_Sovereign._

That's what he called this ship. Speaking to it in rambles in his quarters as a voice spoke to him which she could not personally hear. If anything, it, the ship no less, spoke through him.

But however that link was, it was not kind to him. Not now. Not as, missing an arm and his face with holes and shrapnel in it, much of his blood gone, he was screaming in his unconsciousness.

She had exited that healing chamber to the grey corridors of that ship, the vision of it out of a nightmare: where organic horror and the mechanical nature of it collided in a claustrophobic mess of dark color which even she had never seen in her several hundreds years alive. She was alone now, an uncommon thing, not even considering the Geth units around her that were there for… she assumed guarding. It was rare, and, in the several month-long alliance that she had had with Saren, this was the first time it had been like that.

It was the first time, as she walked to the command "bridge" to make sure Sovereign was still en route to its hiding place, that she felt the tug, the pull, the whisper that pervaded this place like a hand on one's shoulder.

She felt a hand on her shoulder, but there was none there when she turned, alone in that hallway, nothing but the lights of the Geth's optical sensors around her glowing. When her head turned she found the cold though, breathing into an ear she didn't knew she had.

_ **"You were there."** _

It spoke to her. A voice. Speaking her language. Not from sound, but one of thought, words directly being sent into her mind and being forced to comprehend as she felt her skin electrify and she herself held captive by a deep, dark voice.

_ **"We have no history. We are constant. We outlast the stars themselves. All knowledge of your short history will be nothing but a mote of dust within the confines of our memories. Organics mutate, retard, mistaking themselves and destroying themselves in imperfection, worthy of nothing but discard."** _

Her bones shook as the sound of its words, its messages, claimed the very breath in her lungs and held her hostage.

_ **"Anything of note, shall be noted. The rest discarded if useless. You will tell us what you know of them."** _

She was there, over Altis, briefly. She was there with the delegation speaking to the Prophet of Destiny, to the "Fleetmistress" Seylu Karonee. She had born witness to the Covenant and what they revealed themselves. And because of that, in that ship's million, million-year history, she would be the messenger to communicate that there existed something beyond their knowledge.

Saren Arterius begged God for his life, and for now, he was given it, as he screamed awake hours later, another objective on his mind.

* * *

Where JD would go, Mai would. Wherever Mai would go, JD would too. They were each other's shadow, out of habit, or out of security. To any rational person, they understood: the Marine contingent hadn't been trusting of them, and they were, at least, acquaintances with one another. After all they had lived with each for two weeks in a hotel, and that by itself, JD figured, meant something. He was unsure of using that word with her though: friend.

Of course, on the face, he could call her that: Friend. Someone he would want to help. To save. To have her back in a firefight. He knew that she would do the same to him. Though he knew better. Friend meant more, it meant that there existed an understanding of each other beneath it, and JD did not understand her, for as much as he knew.

The Normandy was equipped with a rather clean chow hall. Not meant to entertain the entire crew at once, but it was central. No actual kitchen, kiosks and lockers which spat out pre-packaged food that were the same here as they were in any Navy, regardless of the reality. He wasn't upset that, of his luck, he ended up in the universe where freeze-dried fish and chips tasted the same as the one he had left, but it was something to mull about alongside the topic of Mai on his mind, sitting there with a tray and a vaguely satisfying meal being eaten at.

Again, she stood, this time against the dividing wall, just behind him, arms crossed as she scanned those who would come through and by. She alone had been a rather good deterrent for anyone to join him. He liked being alone, but not being repulsive, which Mai had been displaying enough of an aura of.

They had no duties there on the Normandy, and he recognized the reason. He might've been SOF-capable in the UNSC, but not outright SOF. Here he had been designated as such, and because of that everything he would need to do was to just get ready for his next taskings.

The crew also settled into the mundane and routine of a new ship posting after the battle. The ground team had pressed for information on Shepard, but Chakwas would turn them away. The ship still had to be run, and whatever happened on Eden Prime, happened. Now was the after, and they were going to be as usual until they arrived at their destination:

The Citadel.

Anderson had announced this at some point. The Council had called them, and it would be the only place a Spectre could truly be treated, Nihlus clinging to life.

"I'm bored."

Words he would've said, but didn't, and he was surprised. It had been Mai. It was a common thing: to be bored as Spartan. Activity often included warfare, and she could not practice it here. The Normandy had no such rooms meant to be able to help sustain her: no gym, no range, no private quarters for her as a Spartan. It was the same with many of the smaller frigates she had used to transit from one AO to another, but here, it was now her posting.

She was bored, and she said it aloud in her armor.

"Could try making small-talk." JD thumbed some fries into his face as he turned over in his chair to look at her, still surprised to see a Spartan shadowing him. He was never that special to deserve the attention of someone like her.

Her helmet tilted at him, unbelieving. The adrenaline hadn't exactly drained out of her, having been hours since they dusted off from Eden Prime, however JD had found his sleep well enough by her cot, sitting against the steel wall. She found solace in being his guard as he slept so easily, so quietly, arms crossed on his stomach and head held down.

Even then however he couldn't sleep forever. He still needed his routine.

He still needed to _eat_. So did she, he figured.

He offered a rather stale fry at her, and she looked at it with a tilt of the head before, silently, shaking her head.

JD could only frown as he ate it instead. "Did you like anything we made when we were in Buffalo?"

To be fair they only had a hotel room and its appliances to make meals with, locked in and desperately trying to learn as much as they could of their new world. The offerings hadn't been great, but, in a way, it had been better than what they had now on the Normandy.

"You chose it all." She reminded him, flatly.

He shrugged. "Fair enough."

She had picked up the hint of insult she had accidentally hit him with, cringing internally. "Never really had the choice." She followed up fast, almost awkwardly.

"You have one now, you know."

"Hm?"

"A choice."

Williams had appeared out of the corner of their eyes as JD answered, leaving Mai silent as she approached, uncaring, setting herself down at the table with a barely occupied tray. She just needed something to touch, to hold onto, an excuse to do something other than let the adrenaline drain out of her and experience the truth:

She was a sole survivor.

JD knew it too well as he turned over to her and saw her blank faced, eyes empty, lost in her own thoughts and lost to hours ago.

He was alone when Persei fell, when he had saw the Covenant ships begin their glassing and desperately made for the cave systems which sheltered him and hundreds of others world wide on the jungle planet. No one had come with him, and so in the dark with nothing but chemlights and fire, the unceasing rumble of the glassing above, he had lost himself as he was buried alive in the darkness. He began intimately familiar with what it was like to survive: not only a genocide, but himself.

With all the knowledge he and Mai brought, some could never be understood by the Alliance until it happened. The First Contact War had been fading from memory, but there, on Eden Prime, the Alliance would remember that the Galaxy could be unkind.

Ashley Williams bore the brunt of that.

It was seldom that JD had ever met other survivors, but then, and only then, when he did, they would speak the silent language of horror.

JD rested both his elbows on the table, crossing arms, looking into William's blank stare into the table before she realized he had been looking at her. In that moment they spoke that language of horror.

One where nothing was needed to be said to know that someone knew pain.

"Williams?" JD said raspily, his voice still sore from more use than he had been used to.

"Ashley." She said, softly. "Ashley. Just Ash if you can."

Mai slackened her shoulders as Ashley looked to her. Even as a Spartan she understood the intimidation she could bring. Her armor had been darker than it had originally been, the wolf-grey turning into a darker shade that made her more a shadow than a wolf. She didn't know why she had chosen wolf-grey in the first place, upon requisitioning her armor. Maybe it was because she knew she had been a wolf in the guise of a woman. Maybe it was because she didn't care. In the end what had happened though was every iota of her being reeked of the ability to harm, something Ashley had been witness too as her eyebrows still spoke to some unsaid fear.

With one unclasp of a lock, her helmet had come off. Ashley had seen Mai's face for the first time.

"At ease, Marine." Mai had said, slowly, very slowly, lowering herself into one chair. She couldn't quite sit in it without collapsing it, but she kept enough weight off to be presentable.

JD was pleased that she did sit down, finally.

"You two, you're those Navy spooks, right?" She was jittery, trying to pick up her spoon. It rattled in her grip and she knew. "Hah. Heh- I'm sorry it's just th-" She dropped the utensil back onto the tray, palms wiping at her head. "You guys must be used to shit like this but-"

War changed people. The recoil of a gun that seemed tame and controllable on a range turned into the most violent event in life in combat, not even to think using said gun in anger. The hand would always remember that feeling now, when it happened.

JD raised one hand faintly off the table. There was nothing to worry about. "Are you okay?"

She looked up at the shock trooper. If her mouth was to open it would've been a lie.

The Spartan studied her face as she struggled to answer, and, in her meticulous historical readings in those prior two weeks she was reminded of one thing, looking at her. A coincidence maybe but-

"You're General Williams granddaughter?" Mai stated. Less a question. A fact.

Her social timing and cues had been non-existent, and JD could only curse within himself as he too knew what that meant. Williams seemed to shrink down upon that revelation, a confirmation upon itself.

She had the blood of a coward within her. That's what Mai recognized as Ashley flashed between shocked, offended, and still shaken.

Mai had noticed around from the Hitman Marines that they would give Ashley a wary eye when they passed. Almost the same as the ones they gave the herself. Marines were a fickle bunch, superstitious and believing in their faiths and fairy-tales. For the ODSTs, it had been the bad blood that existed between them and the Spartans. JD hadn't fed into it, but he wasn't the typical character in the corps. Here, the example before them had been the heir of the shame, brought upon by the only human commander to formally surrender to the Turians during the First Contact War.

The blood of Shanxi had been in this woman's birthright.

"I know, I know." She said hurriedly. "Please, just tell me how you it's unsurprising a Williams is the only survivor of her squad." She dared them, fire in her teeth from a past she had to bare.

Mai was cool, but didn't recognize what she had said. "Just a question."

JD had shook his head, grabbing both of their attention as he let his inner cringing out, hands motioning for both of them to cool it. "Past don't matter, Williams. What matters is now, so you alright?"

She calmed down a breath, a few cold breaths coming in and out of her. She hadn't had a change of BDUs so she still stank of battle. Only the filtrated air of the Normandy hid her.

"I'll be fine." She would be, JD knew, she seemed like a tough one, looked like a tough one. Female Marines in the UNSC were, that far into the war, no more different or no more lesser than males. Mai, and all those like her, were the very height of that statement. Here, JD could assume the same if Shepard had been the way she was.

"So not now?" He spoke like his father when he did talk: mostly in questions.

"Who would be?" JD tilted his head one way: a visible recognition of "you're right". Mai had sat frozen however, her face honed in on Williams, unused to hiding her facial expressions given her helmet. "I have to be, anyway. Captain Anderson just put in to Marine HQ back on Arcturus for my transfer onto the Normandy."

Taking a fry he had subtly offered it to her. She waved it off, finally looking down at her meal.

"Been in your place, few times." JD said, biting into the fry. Ashely raised both her eyebrows at him.

"I didn't know we suffered casualties like that before…?" JD felt the sharp knuckle of Mai against his thigh once; a warning. Ashley had been fast to overlook JD's words however as semantics as she realized instead something more important: "I'm sorry."

JD flinched only a little as he shook his head. 'Don't be'. He mouthed it. His eyes were kind, but Ashley saw a tiredness in them; in both of their eyes actually as she returned Mai's blank stare.

"Never seen armor like yours before… What's your name?"

"Chief Gul, Chief Williams." Mai answered back. Williams expected a follow up, explaining her armor, but got none as Mai simply moved her gaze around the room, looking at the Hitmen and the ship crew. It was in this she had caught Kaiden walk over. The pair had seen him walk into the Captain's Quarters minutes ago, only to come out now. Apparently, they weren't the only ones who needed a private word with Anderson.

Kaiden had caught Ashley's question to Mai and he could only join in measuredly. "It's not anything we'd seen before. Prototype, right?" The man said, good natured, taking a seat next to Ashley.

Mai nodded. That much she could give. "Do you need something, Lieutenant?"

He seemed no worse for wear. For being an XO it was a relief that he had not lost any men in the complement, even if the loss to Jenkins in replacement for Ashley was unusual. Kaiden only shook his head. "Just saying hi." He explained simply. "Apparently I'm gonna have to get reacquainted with all my men because they just got changed out by," he gestured over to some of the Marines on guard duty now. "Some other N7's fireteam. Gonna have to update the roster and all that."

"I see." Mai had said gratingly.

"Don't approve of them Chief Gul?"

"Do I have to?"

The way Mai spoke, the coldness that came from her words, it was something JD had taken time, and forced himself, to get used to. He understood, on some measure, where it came from, but her hard edges were the sharpest seen by any in the Alliance. Even Commander Ryder himself, in the end, couldn't compete as Ashley and Kaiden seemed to shrink underneath the Spartan's gaze. They only wondered why JD hadn't been like her.

JD preferred silence. He did, and with Mai there it seemed to force it between her and the situation they all just came from. It all let them, albeit awkwardly, sit there at the chow table silently and eat their food. Kaiden and Ashley exchanged pleasantries, apologies, condolences, as per typically, but JD, for all of his attentiveness: following what sparse conversations there was, it had been undercut by Mai, just sitting there, running thumb over thumb, biding her time for… something. Some unknowable something.

"Lieutenant?"

"Yes Chief Williams?" Kaiden responded as both she and JD had finished their meal.

"Do you mind showing me a locker? I did just kinda, end up here."

"Ah, right." A way out, to bow out. "Follow me."

Ashley had given a slight wave to JD, and he returned it with a nod as he sat back in his chair, Mai getting nothing, and giving nothing as she stood up when they left, returning to the wall, returning her helmet to her face.

_'Jesus.' _No sound came out of the Shock Troopers mouth, but Mai had caught it.

"What?" She asked him, the man twitching as if he was caught, already half way grabbing the box of cigarettes that had been hidden on an inside pocket of his shirt, his omni-tool lit to light. The stick had been in his mouth and lit when he answered, slowly, carefully.

"You come off a bit…" What was the word? "Strong."

He turned to her again, arm against the back of chair halfway turned. She tilted her head like a dog, questioning the world she was in.

"I mean," he continued. "We just got out of a fight. You make them feel… tense."

He sucked in his breath, blew smoke, and interestingly the smoke was drawn down. The filtration system filtered down to the floor. Normally, on ships like these after battles with the Covenant, grown men would be crying, Marines brought to the bone by the horror of a losing war. If they were as lucky to have evacuated civilians they were disassociated with themselves, questioning their very existence as their homes burned, escaping from where they were. Only the veterans, like JD, who had seen too many planets burn, knew that they could do nothing to help anyone process. Each person had to deal with their horrors themselves, and otherwise, all they could do was just sit there and smoke to deal with themselves.

"I'm sorry." She said to him. He was confused for a moment. Drag, blow, the taste of tobacco got rid of the fish.

He shook his head at her and that, immediately, got a reaction. Her eyes widened just for a moment as JD explained. "Not to me. And… don't apologize."

"I wasn't helping."

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Did you really have to mention who she was to her?" Mai stared blankly at JD as he said that question, the light in her eyes questionative, her pupils staring down for but a moment, before looking up at him.

"No." She said; admitted.

JD straightened his mouth. "Yeah."

There were no such things as cowards, dead Spartans, or Insurrectionists in the war against the Covenant. Only heroes.

The fact that there had been a galaxy where a human general could surrender to an alien threat it was preposterous to the two.

"Heavy."

Mai tilted her head again. "Hm?"

"You're heavy to be around. I can feel it." What that meant was that to everyone else she was like a black hole: an exclusion zone around her that clawed at any passerby. "Armor's not helping."

Untouched by battle, the kinetic barrier and the shields left her armor pristine. She wasn't affected at all by Eden Prime, and that by itself had been scary.

"Won't take it off." She stated.

"You should." JD said back, almost as if an order. He was surprised the way his voice rose, moving the smoke in front of it. He spoke like that to Spartan. "Why won't you?"

Mai depolarized her visor, her eyes blank, narrowed, at JD. Once or twice she had gone to open her mouth to answer, but nothing came out. No answer came. None that she, for the first time in her life, wouldn't feel ashamed for using.

The Covenant War was no longer a threat. Humanity was not at risk of extinction. Her singular purpose was gone.

She never answered, her arms limply hanging by her sides as she and JD held their gaze. This was how they talked: short bursts, and if not that, with eyes and with hands.

JD felt the impulse to raise his hands, even with a cigarette in between the fingers of one. She would get used to dealing with people. She had to. She was a Spartan, she was stronger than any awkwardness between them all.

"Did you see Nihlus get on?" He posed, curious.

She shook her head with the subject. They both froze when he had appeared in the docking bay. Not a human, an alien, the way his mouth moved, his beady eyes scanned and cast themselves upon them. If it hadn't been for the sparse encounter back in New Buffalo they would've done something worse, but they trained themselves to handle the inevitable.

They both looked to the Medbay. Nihlus and Shepard were now hanging by a thread, but they could do nothing. Chakwas cared for both of them.

"Do you think-" JD paused, stopped himself. It was dangerous to think the thought he was to say. His teeth shut close before his mouth and Mai caught him. Raising one finger up she had wiggled it a bit. He recognized it, a Spartan Sign: Private comms.

She leaned in, taking a seat again. She wanted to hear what he was to say and pressed him on it almost physically.

"Do you think I did my best for Commander Shepard?" He relented, quietly, like a whisper, rubbing his forehead with the heel of his palm before taking a drag in the same motion. Mai could never get used to the smell of tobacco, thankful for the helmet's filtration system, her nose scrunched.

"You didn't know what was wrong with her. No one does."

JD breathed a breath filled with ash and smoke. "I know." He nodded to himself. "I know."

To take care of people. Mai saw that in JD. He wanted to take care of people, and he had definitely done that with her. He was patient with her, and, briskly, she could hardly think of any other Marine who would've treated this whole situation, her, with as much grace as he did. He was still a Marine, but he had been measured in a way that spoke to a temperament that betrayed his age.

Shepard had been older than them, Mai had the luxury of a mask and her very being as a Spartan, but JD alone seemed world weary on his face. He understood that people needed help, for he had seen too many lost.

That's what Mai thought of him as he gazed out toward the Medbay and let the cigarette burn through its white, barely singing his finger as he shook his head out of it.

She knew something pertinent for him to learn.

"Want to know the Spartan Sign for taking care of?"

JD had looked at her a second, ash flicked away into his consumed food's tray, considering. "How do Spartans use it?"

Mai's eyes flashed back to a memory. A lifetime ago, and yet only a few weeks.

They were on the beaches, running up to the Sabre launch facility. Covenant had been laying siege to it and they had come in from behind. Only the Jackals had any foresight to look behind surprisingly, and when they did, they had caught Kat, B320, in her robotic arm.

Mai knew Kat, a long time ago, from their time at Onyx. Not on a personal basis, but they had bumped shoulders and acted in concert during training ops they were teamed with on. She was tough, but not tough enough to fully wave off a Needler Carbine shot to her mechanical arm, having caught her with her shields down.

"Cover!" Carter had yelled, faster than Mai had ever seen. "Cover!"

Jorge had moved up with his gun suppressing fire as Carter dove for Kat behind cover, the woman trying to get the pink shard out of her arm's body. Mai had noticed this barely as she was busy lobbing a grenade with one hand and firing her AR with the other. Jorge looked and expected an answer. Carter had given him an answer, his dominant hand almost at his chin, palm up and curved as if a cup, only to gesture toward Kat as he had helped her clear the jam in her arm.

Mai had wondered how many IIIs, or personnel other than IIs, had been privvy, or in a more general sense, in on Spartan Signals. She wondered if Jorge had been the first Spartan-II on NOBLE, and that if Carter had been taught them before. Kurt had entrusted in her the secrets of the IIs, and if someone else of his caliber had entrusted Carter, she had imagined back then, serving in Noble, he could be relied on.

Those were the hoops she had to jump through mentally to acclimate to operating in a team.

Hoops she had to go through now with the ODST before her.

"For first aid, medical attention. If they're attending to someone."

She did it before him, and JD had, almost like a mirror, copied. This was how he learned sign language after all.

She nodded, his copy good. It was grisly but JD could imagine where he could use this. Most of them involved Shepard bleeding out, Mai providing cover fire.

JD laid his right hand against his chest before moving it flat next to his ear and then forward, transitioning then to her sign, cradling over his chest. An odd combination, but one he was familiar with. It was directed at her.

For her short time in Noble, her status as Lone Wolf hung over her. Kat had been the only one who would've been qualified to say anything of their new number six: having seen her before on Onyx.

"_Lone Wolf, eh?" Emile prodded at her on their way to Sword Base to stave off the initial attack. "I'm sure the trainers loved you back on Onyx."_

"_They didn't." Kat had responded fast and hard, one leg held out of the Falcon. "Then again… it was only fair you were given no teammates during our force-on-force exercises, right?"_

She wasn't used to being taken care of, and she was hung up as the sign sent at her was translated into word in her mind. She scoffed, turning her head away, not even considering it.

JD hadn't noticed as he repeated the action a few times before settling, running his right hand then through letter signing, just to see if he remembered the alphabet as best he could.

"She'll be fine." Mai looked at his hands as they shuffled, A through Z. He had paused at M, looking up to her.

"Hope so." Leaning back in his chair his mood had changed, given something to do. "If you're bored, I can teach you to sign."

She nodded once and that was that, damning the fact she still wore her armored gloves. "Alphabet first. Alpha through Zulu."

He learned sign language when he was young, but it was not his first language. His first had been the UNSC Standard: English. His mother had wanted him to learn like his peers, normally, but when the school day was over and when he was old enough, this was how he would spend time with his mother in the kitchen of their apartment on Luna.

It brought him back to better times as he balled his hands into a fist, his free hand waving Mai down. "Just watch."

Like the Spartan she was during a briefing, she watched, she examined, and she learned her ABCs all over.

* * *

She knew what a Medbay felt like. Or rather, she knew what a Medbay smelt like. That was the first thing that hit her senses as her eyes tore themselves open from the black and remembered what she was doing:

Running.

She woke up as men of action always do: With a hard breath, the seizing of their arms and a bite. With one fluid motion, despite her best interests, she had tried to sit up a moment after she was cognitive again only to end up on the hard metal floor, feeling around her hip and praying to god there was a weapon. Going on sense alone, there was none, and so she had done the next best thing, pulling her fingers into her designated touch map, the orange omni-tool around her arm glowing as a blade came out.

"Hey! Hey! Hey!" A familiar voice was heard as she felt for cover, finding the platform she had just been on and crunching herself against it.

She opened her mouth finally, getting in as much air into her as her vision cleared. "Who?! Who is that?!"

"Shepard! Shepard!"

_"You won't get me you __**fucking**__ Batarian-!" _Her cry, a way cry no less had been heard as the door to the Medbay was opened and several men came flooding in, the metallic footsteps of a metal monster coming in.

A shrill voice, and older voice. _**"You're on the Normandy!"**_

She finally opened her eyes and saw sanctity, rising up and over.

She was on the Normandy: in front of her, her new XO.

"Kaiden." She said, breathlessly, unsure of herself, now only realizing her omni-tool had been lit and exposed with a blade. Eyes wide open, standing up, her first truly lucid moments of wake had been immediately hit back by a throbbing in her head. An ache that hurt but she could break through.

She felt the light touch behind her, a flash of grey as she turned around. It was Doctor Chakwas giving her a motherly look, one that writ concern on it as, using her own vision, drew hers down. Right down to the weapon she had drawn.

"You had us worried there, Shepard." Chakwas was prompt, the woman in question deactivating her blade, her face coming to a forced laugh.

"Sorry." Was all she could say, turning back around, seeing her men and women.

"You good there, Commander?" Kaiden looked at her with a concern that was less about her and more about what had been done to her. They all knew the legend of Commander Shepard. They hadn't known what she had been through however, and this was a hint they never wanted as, just one last time, Shepard patted her hip for a pistol.

The commander nodded yes, trying for a smile, leaning forward and finding the bed in the Medbay she was at. She knew the drill. Even as a dumb teenager she had seen enough Medbays to know what to do and what the process was.

There was a different smell however, and it smelled like-

She glanced behind her fully now, catching a bubble she had only seen before vaguely on leaked images from the Migrant Fleet and their medical procedures. This was the human equivalent, made for-

"Oh my god."

She knew she had been knocked out. She recognized the fuzzy feeling that permeated her temples and gave her cotton mouth, but there was a measure of darkness that came from being knocked out on a bunk that was right next to a set up burn ward for a special agent that had seen more combat than years she had been alive.

And yet he laid there, like a burnt stick figure, tubes stuck into at least three holes of him and his natural plates either gone, ripped off, or stuck to his figure in the same way some metal from his arm was welded onto his flesh. There was a man in that bubble with him, cloaked in a sterile, one body suit, slowly applying specialized medigel to him. He hadn't paused to look at the fanfare of Shepard.

She'd seen worse, but wouldn't wish this on a pirate.

"Brain activity shows he's alive. In fact it was the same as you, for a bit: a trauma induced coma." Shepard looked away from Nihlus and back to Chakwas and her crew, news of her waking spreading fast and hard as Kaiden tried to corral them back.

"I was in a straight up coma?" She shook her head in disbelief. "How long was I out?"

"Fifteen hours." Chakwas answered, going to her omni-tool and passing them over Shepard before going to her more physical instruments. "Can you feel this?"

A small syringe drew blood from her forearm's vein. With one twinge, she nodded. It felt normal. There were still tests to run on her, and it'd help the more… intrusive ones that she was awake to consent.

"Something happened down there, Commander." Kaiden had approached her after he had settled the crowd. Some Marines had just wanted a look see, to see if Shepard had indeed been awake, falling back into duty. Some had stayed, if not only to grab a look at Shepard, but also Nihlus. Of all of them however, it was Chief Gul that stuck out like a sore thumb, her armor still on and heads and heads taller than the rest.

Shepard's face had gone straight. "Was the objective completed?" Some more Marines bowed out, not wanting to see what happened when Shepard got the truth and the debrief. Kaiden had shrunk, but sprung back out as he gave the answer.

"Mission failed, Commander."

"Eden Prime?"

A smirk at the corner of Kaiden's mouth. "Safe now. Hopefully, 1st Fleet is over there now and even before we left, the rest of our fireteams helped secure and fortify the colony and its defenders."

"Then that's a victory in my book." Shepard looked around, hoping Anderson hadn't been there to hear that. In that glance she caught the face of Ashley. She was here now, she had lived, and that was good to hear and see. "Sergeant Emerson?" She called.

"Yes ma'am?" The dark Marine stepped forward from the crowd, besides Kaiden.

"You were transferred from the 1st, correct?"

"Yes ma'am." She nodded her head, pleased.

"Good to hear… Alright then, everyone who wasn't on my fireteam dismissed, back to your duties."

A thunderous sync had roared out, over a dozen men repeating: "Yes ma'am!" At once. They were obviously have been glad to see Shepard okay. She was loved throughout the Alliance. Perhaps, in some way, as a figurehead, but more as a reliable leader. One not weighed down with vanity or politics. Those that remained felt that as the crowd that had, at once, filtered into the Medbay filtered out.

"Where's Jenkins?" Shepard seized up again, looking around at those who remained. He hadn't-

"Back on Eden Prime, ma'am." Kaiden reported, leaning on one table. He had been holding in a breath unknowingly, glad that Shepard was alive, one that, for but a briefest of moment, also let JD breath easy. "He's acting as Alliance liaison. Technically insubordination, but he wouldn't leave his home. It's alright though, we're still at full strength."

In one gesture Kaiden had pointed to the new addition. "Chief Williams?" Shepard asked aloud.

A salute. Not a formality, but one of respect. "Reporting to duty Commander. Captain Anderson is clearing me for my posting here."

Shepard warmly smiled. She'd seen Ashley in action. She could keep up. No, she figured, it was more of a question if anyone could keep up with- "And what about you two, how you two Frogmen like running with us Marines?"

"Glad you're up, ma'am." Was all JD could say, shaking off the jab to a branch he would never truly be a part of.

Mai only stood there, silent, a simple nod the only clue that she had been listening to her at all.

"Still armored up, Chief Gul?" Shepard asked, concerned almost. Was there some threat still there?

"Yes ma'am."

"Why?"

"Personal preference."

In the same way Shepard would feel for a gun upon waking up, she could not fault Mai if her abilities clued her into the life she lived. With a nod, the Commander dropped it.

"I'm sorry about the Beacon, Commander-"

"Is it destroyed?"

Kaiden nodded regretfully. "I must've set off something. Maybe it detected my Biotics; tripped the security system when I approached it… It grabbed both me and Chief Williams and-"

"Yes, yes," Shepard held her face in her hands, feeling the failure of the mission just now hit her. "I remember that… Remember shoving you two out. I remember you, Chief Gul, trying to pull me out." Mai nodded again, hands behind her back. "You were gonna rip my damned arm for my socket, Christ."

Rolling her arm a bit, Shepard massaged what she could, but it was sore. "I'm sorry, ma'am."

Shepard raised her hand. "No need. Thank you, Chief Gul." No one ever thanked her for what she did. Not Ackerson. Not ONI. Not Mendez or Kurt.

It felt… nice?

Yeah, Mai decided, it felt nice to be thanked in such a warm voice, sincere and grateful.

"Me too, Commander, I should've-"

Again. "No need, Chief Williams. You two had no way to know that was going to happen… sheesh, when did Marines get so polite?"

Shepard could only lighten the mood so much with a burn victim in the room, her bearings returning to her as she felt Chakwas sneak her hands beneath her uniform's shirt and attach a sensor to her.

"We don't even know if that's what set it off, Commander," Chakwas said as she attached the necessary equipment to Shepard. "Unfortunately, there's not much left of the Beacon to find out what happened."

"It overloaded," Kaiden continued. "Blast knocked you out cold, and me and the rest of Hitman had to drag you back on the ship."

Shepard could smile for but a briefest second, thankful for her men. "I appreciate it, all of you." She cast her gaze onto all those present as JD and Mai, slowly, walked forward, all of them surrounding Shepard on that table.

A few beeps had emanated from some nearby medical equipment the sensors on Shepard's flesh were connected to. It didn't take more than a few scans for Chakwas to deduct this: "Physically, you're fine. But I detected some unusual brain activity, abnormal beta waves." The good doctor went back to work unhooking Shepard, letting her stand, the commander more than happy to get on her two feet again. "I also noticed an increase in your rapid eye movement, signs typically associated with intense dreaming…" Chakwas looked to JD, the medic on site.

Doc was the man in the bubble with Nihlus, more than happy to apply his academic medical upbringing with Chakwas onto the Turian. It meant that he couldn't comment, but JD could, and he did. "Started the second we got you down, Commander, your eyes were crazy since the first moment."

It was in that moment Shepard was liable to let her eyes run wild again, remembering the echoes of a- not a dream…

She had realized she had seen a vision inside of her head.

From the office section of the Medbay another nurse arrived, showing data from Shepard's test in a form to Chakwas. Hushed words were whispered from the doctor to the nurse's ear, telling him to stay and to note. Anything was noteworthy right now as Shepard fell back, leaned on the table. Details coming back to her she wasn't quite ready to process, emotionally, cognitively, and even sanely.

"I was dreaming." She said, eyes looking beyond everything and everyone, into an unknowable image. "Death, destruction. Metal and flesh. Do…" She hesitated. "Do any of you know H.R Giger? He was an artist back on Earth, last century."

All of them, even JD and Mai, looked back into their memories.

They all shook their heads, none knew the name. With a huff, Shepard continued: "He was a horror artist, I think. The only reason why I know of him was because, when I was in Europe as a teen, I went to this, well, art show with art dedicated to his style."

"What's it like, Commander?" Ashley leaned in. She didn't know the name, but she convinced herself it sounded familiar. Perhaps her love of old books, of old English authors, would actually come in handy. H.R Giger was the furthest thing from it however.

"Horror." She said. "Metal shaped in the way of flesh. Biomechanical corridors that no living thing was ever meant to traverse. Grotesque, like the inside of a bug, but all of it- all of it-" She went on, losing her words. "Imagine pulling apart this ship, and instead of gears and machinery, you saw flesh, and blood, and organs and-" She stopped herself. She imagined the flesh of man, torn apart, by metal hands, for all eternity, screaming through mesh until it became cold and steel. Her head darted around, looking for a bucket, a trash can. When she did find one she flew for it, sticking her head into it before her mouth erupted.

The assistant nurse saw it all, recorded it all in her notes.

Voices whispered into her ears like hallucinations, describing what she saw to her in a language she could not afford to know, but understood anyway like metal nails against stone.

Minutes passed, her stomach emptied, and they all stood there and bore witness as a nightmare brought Commander Shepard to her knees.

Chakwas knelt down besides her after the retching stopped and the dry heaving began, a glass of water in her hand Shepard clung to and set down her gullet like a cure.

Slowly, shakily, she rose herself back up.

She was a spectacle all to herself that kept even JD and Mai focused on her, not noticing when Captain Anderson slunk in.

"She saw a vision." Was all Chakwas could say as Shepard tried to regain her bearings, staring up at the ceiling, forcing herself to relive what she saw because it was too important not to take. She had that vision for a reason. Those visions meant something as she clawed at her own memory and, all at once, spoke more.

"I saw… a city. I saw a city." Shepard continued, slowly. "Not one I've ever seen before... All humans."

Chakwas looked down at the notes her assistant was keeping and, forwarding to Anderson. They all leaned in in some way as Shepard looked into her memory, remaining with her, only to look up and blankly stare at the ceiling still as the words eased out of her mouth like the water she just put in. _**"New Jerusalem."**_

The next sound in that room had been Mai sucking in air into her lungs through her nose. Words spoken that meant the world to her. Her face remained blank, and both Anderson and JD desperately tried to not take a glance at her. They succeeded, but if they had seen Mai's face they would've seen the furrow in her brow, concern written on her face that only deepened as Shepard went on, none the wiser.

"I saw a girl, teenager maybe, get kidnapped. A- a van. Black van. Clandestine."

Mai's eyes sunk deeper still and JD held his breath.

"Then what happened?" Chakwas wanted her to go on.

"Whoever those people were, they saw me, knew I saw it… then they chased me. I ran through those streets and, and- I saw a city." She repeated.

Mai remembered her home in her dreams. She remembered it when seen from below: towers that erupted from the grounds and into the heavens so impossibly far. Streets she was never allowed to walk on and paths forbidden to her to go down by her mother. Neon lights and the roar of the populace arguing within itself creating a war that hadn't been the Insurrection or the Covenant.

She remembered the cold.

She remembered who she once was.

"I've been to Elysium and Timbuktu." Shepard started, sweaty palm on a sweaty forehead, cold herself. "I've walked across Russia and invaded planets. Sumatra, France, the Ivory Coast, Novaya Zelmya and Buenos Aires… I've been to Cavalry and Masada and Mecca. But I've never been to a New Jerusalem."

One of Chakwas' nurses looked into their omni. "No such settlement exists." He reported.

"Was this all one vision? One dream?"

"No." Shepard said at first, unsure, but nodding to herself. "No. I think this was separate."

After Beta Company was sent to die and she was made the first Headhunter, Mai knew what had happened to New Jerusalem. The nurse was correct in what he said, both now and in their own galaxy. New Jerusalem had been attacked by the Covenant five years after she was taken. The planet wasn't taken, but it was partially glassed before a UNSC fleet drove them off. Apparently, the Covenant didn't find anything of value the first time around and backed off. It was enough for the main colony to go up however; destroyed. When Mai discovered this, that was when she decided to secretly make her necklace. Her Mother couldn't have possibly been alive. Not after that long. Not after the war.

"Fighting. I saw fighting. Civil riots. Secular in nature." Shepard went on, almost unbelieving of herself. "They were burning flags, books, hurling rocks at each other as the police did nothing... That flag I've never seen before."

Shepard seem hung up on it, and JD and Mai dreaded the answer. Despite this, it still came.

"What was it?"

Shepard paused, and then remembered. "Earth, with an eagle perched on it."

The emblem of the United Nations Space Command.

* * *

They had made a bee-line back to their lockers, the only place they could conceivably get privacy, and when they had gotten there Mai had for once, put herself into a sit against the Mako. JD leaned into the steel wall, Mai sitting there, blankly staring vaguely down at the floor. "How were you taken?" She looked up at him, daggers in her eye, but her face sad. She tilted her head. "She saw you, didn't she?"

Mai's eyes were empty. She alone could barely remember that night, that is if she even wanted to. It was buried for a reason, deep in the corner of her mind that Chief Mendez and Ambrose had wanted her to tuck away. If she could barely recall it, it was something else, something terrible, that someone else had to bear witness to it.

Anderson had stayed in and thrown everyone but medical staff and Shepard out of the Medbay. She was due her debrief, and she had skirted a line very close to humanity's greatest secret. It was a quarantine on coincidence it felt like, but it just felt so, so-

"I don't know." Mai answered flatly. "I don't know if she saw my memories."

By itself, it was a stupid prospect: that their new XO had seen the memories of a woman from a literal different universe all on a fluke from a barely understood ancient alien piece of tech.

"You would know, Mai." He kept saying her name, in times like this, when they weren't being cloaked by their disguise as System Alliance Navy personnel. He hadn't heard her name spoken this much in years, and yet JD had spoken it as if it was normal. It wasn't normal to her. "I knew ONI was into some real... choice stuff, but I didn't think that they still did the literal van and black bagging routine."

She didn't regret, at all, what had happened to her. Not one bit. But that belief did not stand as well, as sturdy, when someone saw how she was taken with their very eyes. In the end, no matter who spun the story of the Spartans, it was wrong.

"Tell me, then, JD," she started, unsure of where she was going. "How was I supposed to be recruited? How did you?"

JD leaned back, eyes closed for a moment as he remembered that day, long ago. Running his hand through his messy hair he had very much known it.

"Well, uh, I was seventeen. Dad had just died because of some toxicity thing, ate something he shouldn't have. The inner colonies were just beginning to fall under siege..." He didn't know why he had let the conversation fall, but Mai needed it. For someone to interrogate this to her, it was… It wasn't right.

One of Hitman had walked back absentmindedly, going up the elevator to get some chow. They kept their silence as the man did, their history being their held secret.

The relationship between the inner and outer colonies in the UNSC had never been stellar or great. For years before the Covenant the UNSC had fought another war: the one which Mai had sometimes waged on her lonesome. The Insurrection: Colonies who wanted to form away from the rule of Earth and would do so with violence. Some argued without the Insurrection humanity, via its ability to test space warfare in it, wouldn't have been able to put up any fight against the Covenant.

Regardless though, it still meant hostility and tensions remained, and the fact that the Outer Colonies bore the brunt of it offered a separation to those who lived on Earth and on the Inner Colonies. When the first Inner Colonies were hit, that was, for the first time, the war became real and extinction stared at all of humankind.

"There was a recruiting station, near Dad's police station. I'd been talking to them for weeks, even before Dad died. The Corps would offer my Mother a stipend and benefits for being a widow, and her only son being enlisted." JD paused, listening to himself. Mai caught this, her head tilting ever so slightly as if to listen in more, to hear something that she missed. "And uh, Dad, before he died, he signed a waiver for me to enlist. He didn't want me to, but he knew- he just knew."

"A waiver?" Mai asked.

"Yeah," JD started carefully. "The requirement for enlistment is that you have to be eighteen years of age... usually that is." He referred to her. "I was seventeen."

Only now did Mai realize she had never, other than her other Spartan-IIIs, seen a trooper younger than eighteen. She wondered what type of person she could've been, if she had been allowed to, even in her pitiful existence, live to eighteen, but that had been lost to her.

He made motions with his fingers, unconsciously. "Anyway, It was as simple as handing in papers, waiting for your ship date, and then getting corralled into a shuttle and sent off to a boot camp. Luna had one. Was there for like, a quarter of the year."

"You were a Marine first, right?"

"Still am." He said softly. It was a joke, a dig at her to know better. A flash of annoyance came by her face but he continued. "I was a usual Marine for one tour. Green and all that."

After that he became as she saw him now: an ODST, clad in black armor, the best of the UNSC, beat only by her and people like her.

"Why'd you do it?"

"Hm?"

"Join, I mean. I think you knew that joining the Corps wasn't good for you, even back then."

Words came easy when speaking to Mai, he had realized then and there. He looked down at his hands, catching them about to sign the word for-

"Selfish." He said to himself, more than her. Suddenly Maai had heard what she was looking for.

He spoke easily to Mai, he had told himself, because she wouldn't judge him. He abused her sense of social understands in that way, vaguely, and he felt bad. But she listened, and it meant a lot for a man that many in his unit assumed was mute.

She looked at him with those piercing blue eyes, her problems disregarded for a moment, again forgetting who she was, and how she had become who she was. They were questioning.

In the words of an old Colonel, from a different war, from a different history: It was judgement that defeated them.

"I didn't want to be there when the Covenant invaded my home. If I was going to die, I'd do it on the front."

Silence filled in the moments, the hum of the Normandy around them enveloping them like a cacoon. This was their metamorphisis.

Mai's eyes had been on the smaller side, her eyes almost like that of the cats spoken in Egpytian folklore. When they widened a bit, as if taking JD in more, her gaze cast on him, he noticed, holding her gaze for one moment before going for the squashed box of cigarettes in his back pocket, straightening one out with his teeth and holding it.

"That doesn't sound selfish at all." She noted.

He paused, flicking on his omni-tool and bringing it close to his face. He shrugged, lighting the cigarette.

Sucking in air through the filter Mai had, without her helmet, become aware of just how foul cigarettes were as he blew out. Her face scrunched, but she hid her reaction as JD closed his eyes, trying to savor the hit.

"More than that, if I'm being honest." Again, Mai tilted her head, finally sitting down herself, back against that same steel. "I left Mom." There was guilt in it, using his palm to rub his eye, cigarette held still.

Mai had remembered something very distinct as she had looked at JD's hands and the words he could talk with them.

JD's Mother was deaf.

"Could she-"

JD cut her off. "Yeah, she could live well enough on her own. We had nice neighbors, and the precinct was always fond of her. She grew up independent despite it all."

"But then why do you feel selfish about it?"

It was so easy to admit when his mother was dead and his universe was gone. It felt like cheating. He felt dirty, almost as dirty as the cigarette he was puffing on.

"Just left her. I didn't want people to rely on me. I didn't think I could take care of people." He said fast, hard, knowingly. He felt weight on his chest and he was sure as hell that it hadn't been what he was smoking. How many men and women had he been left alone to remember?

Sadie Kassul. 13th UNSC Army division. Corporal. Mother disowned her for joining the military. But that was okay, she didn't talk to her mother. She died during the evacuation of New Persia. Plasma Pistol overcharge blast. JD saw her armor melt into her flesh, into her heart.

Captain Avery Blaszko. UNSC Frigate Yesterday's War. May or may not have had an affair with JD's ODST platoon sergeant at the time, but was otherwise a dependable, personable captain. As far as JD could recall the Yesterday's War was posted over Reach, and that meant what it did.

"Seriously? You smoke?"

The two looked up, a shadow over them. Older man, average military cut, eyes sunken deep but heavy with duty and observance. It was Chief Engineer Adams.

JD had tried to find a place to put it out upon seeing the engineer of the Normandy above him.

"Hey hey, not on the floor." He said raggedly, JD stopped just short using his pants before Adams rose his hand. "I don't got a problem with smoking, Frogman, just try to keep it away from the core."

JD nodded up at him, opening his mouth, but it wasn't his voice that came. "I'll make sure he's down there, next time."

Adams had given a glance at Mai, the woman averting her eyes, hands held in each other.

"Ah, right, thanks." Adams had waved off.

JD sucked in another drag before looking back down to Mai. "Does it bother you, at all? That Shepard saw your home? Saw yo-"

Mai cut him off. "How could she?" She asked a question she was sure she was going to hear again and again in the following days from Anderson or whoever was assigned to them.

"She said the name of your _**colony**_, Mai. She saw _**you**_ get taken."

"That's impossible." Her teeth ground together like chalk.

"So is the reason why we're here."

They crossed realities to get to this point. One more stretch of the imagination was by no means an insincere gesture to them.

"She saw nothing but a dream."

"A nightmare, it sounded more like."

They sat there for a long while, JD going through a moral battle he had thought he had dealt with with himself. It wasn't up to him to reconcile what had been Mai's very nature, her upbringings, but he had to if only because he now bore the weight of what it was like to be a citizen of the UEG and know his very existence hinged on the existence of her, a Spartan.

If he were still living the life he was born into, if he had known what Mai had told him about the Spartans, would he had been okay with that given what they did for humanity?

He never answered that question, only put it away, let the problem of acclimatizing to this new world take him. But now, with that question brought up again, he had to answer that question.

"You were wronged Mai." It came out thicker than any cigarette or cigar could've. "You were wronged."

The Spartan jerked, almost as if to leave, but she didn't, instead staying her ground, saying nothing.

"I know you're at peace with who you are now. I know you would've chosen this life again, but the fact remains that what was done to you was wrong." It was the fastest he'd ever spoken in his life, because he feared Mai would up and leave, would not take what he was saying, but in her armor, behind her helmet, she was like a statue.

"Please Mai, do you know why I'm saying this?"

It was worse than being built on a lie. She was built on a wrong: a sin. She was the result of sin.

She should've been okay with that. She should've, Mai thought, biting her lip, just shy of breaking skin and drawing blood. She couldn't though, she couldn't even admit that to herself. She had killed more men and women and children then any Spartan before or after her would ever admit. The Master Chief would never be able to go as low as her because she had been there first. All done in the name of ending the Insurrection so Humanity could devote more lives to stopping the Covenant. She knew she did bad things, horrible things, and she knew that whatever death delivered her to her mother, it wouldn't be a good death.

She took this all willingly, and she'd do it all again because she knew, her own truth, was that it was important. That if it wasn't her it'd be someone else.

However then and there she couldn't say the words that JD wanted to hear:

_ **I know.** _

It was to admit that what Shepard saw was wrong and that her very beginnings owed her all the good and salvation in all the galaxy: the price of her ability to wage war too high for humanity, from an individual to as a whole, to pay.

It was to see it how JD saw it, and how he decided.

"I would've killed them if I had the chance." If he were in Shepard's shoes. If he were actually there with a gun in his hand. If he could've done something_, anything_.

"You would've stopped me from becoming… me?" Mai finally said, still unmoving. "From becoming a Spartan?"

Another drag, longer, half the damn cigarette as he considered the question. Did the effectiveness of one Spartan justify it all? Especially if humanity was doomed anyway?

He looked at her, turned his head and she looked back. He wanted to tear off her helmet and speak to her, her bare ears listening, her eyes taking him not through glass but through her corneas. He was a man of actions, not words, silence was his tongue until he was forced to do otherwise. Thus, every word carried weight and what came out of his mouth carried the weight of who he was as a human.

"_**Who would I be if I didn't?"**_

* * *

A space station the size of which they had never seen before, buried inside of a cloud of stardust. It emerged from behind the space particulates as it sat, graceful among the stars.

The military personnel on the ship emerging from FTL could hardly comprehend it as it sat in the white light. The names for it rolled off the tongues of every species that saw it, and all of them were grandiose: The Keep, The Menagerie, The Altar, The Throne for Dead Gods, The Citadel. There was hardly a unifying light as the men and women of that ship looked at it and stood in awe of something that no one in that galaxy could've possibly made.

When it was discovered, the very implication of it was broad, was scary, was a cosmic horror story that, if thought about, harkened back into a galactic perspective they could not comprehend at all. Perhaps that's why they gave the space station such an elaborate name. It deserved it.

Why was it built? Why was it left like this? What happened to those that made it? Just how did they make it?

These questions, or rather, the pursuit of these questions, was what kept some who did dare ask them sane. Every question, no matter how mythical or ancient, had an answer.

There is danger however_. A danger in secrets. Both in seeking, and in knowing. Somethings were meant to be hidden from view._

These questions, these secrets to this space station and those who made it and all like it, were answered.

The path humanity took now, forever changed.

For all the names that aliens and humans alike gave this construct, the name that stuck was the name that was the most comprehensible.

For many that had come with them, the captain of that ship recognized he was one of a few who had seen it before, and in fact, rather recently. At the bridge of his ship as the crowd gathered around, replacements for those he had lost just days ago, he spoke about the station before them:

"They call it: _**Halo**_."

The Pillar of Autumn made it to the Soell System with coordinates given to Cortana by Halsey, extracted by Noble Team as their dying act. She made it with a flotilla of ships tasked to protect her as the defenses in Aszod failed and the desperate measures were called.

In another universe, another story, timeline, reality, the Pillar of Autumn, overwhelmed by Thel Vadamee's fleet, would crash on Halo, bereft of their proper introduction as the Forerunners themselves wanted. Humanity, against the lie the Covenant was based on, were the true Reclaimers: the heirs to the Mantle of Responsibility.

Though this was not that story.

The Pillar of Autumn made it to Halo, its custodian welcoming them, the pitch and presence of the Geas of one-man restoring humanity's rightful place in the universe. The Librarian's plan fulfilled, the Didact left cold forever on a lost planet, soon to be rediscovered. Installation 04 sheltered the survivors of Reach, and all of its defenses brought to bear destroyed the Fleet of Particular Justice. Corpses were pushed aside, secrets uncovered, and, in the end, Operation RED FLAG was modified ultimately.

The last of the UNSC's offensive fleet came to the coordinates the Pillar of Autumn and its flotilla delivered, and before them stood a gun pointed at the head of the Covenant.

"Is Sanghelios in range of this installation?" Captain Keyes turned around, and asked not a man, but a construct.

343 Guilty Spark. The Monitor of Installation 04. A floating lightbulb. Tinkerbell if she was a male-oriented ancient construct in charge of a superweapon.

He floated onto the bridge, Installation 04 left in Reclaimer hands, the UNSC setting up station there as the Autumn led itself to the end of the war.

"Yes!" The AI answered cheerily. "The planet you know as Sanghelios is very much in range of this installation. If you would like to use Installation 03 as a staging point for the Reclaimer counterattack, I will contact 049 Abject Testament immediately!"

The bridge cleared as a metal mess of a man walked forward, held on one arm, at his hip, was another weapon inherited: a massive machine gun, dirty and bloodied by Covenant. He would've very much liked to end the life of every single Elite with his own hands, but humanity did not have that luxury.

That was why he was here…

He was here for two reasons, technically, one of them more prudent then the other. He had an object in his hand, but Guilty Spark never noticed. Not as the purple projection of a woman appeared at the Autumn's station for her, her glowing irises looking at the Halo solemnly. Even as an AI, thinking on a measure a million times faster than any human could, she stared at the Installation far longer than she was comfortable with, turning to Guilty Spark.

"Will this…?" She held out her hand, and a T-shaped object appeared. "Work for any Installation?"

The Activation Index? "Why… yes? How did you acquire this?"

The Monitor sounded worried as Captain Keyes shot a look to the Master Chief, the Spartan setting down his adopted machine gun onto the floor, the disc in his hand ready.

Cortana shimmied her hips a bit, proud of herself. "While you were awfully occupied with consulting with me about human history and our ability to be "Reclaimers" we… reclaimed something on our own."

343 Guilty Spark never noticed the bridge fill with Marines, or why the humans had been so dodgy with him, secretive, ever since they had left his Installation after getting information on 03 and its capabilities. He hadn't even been able to brief the humans on the Infestation!

But alas, once, long ago, he had been a man, vulnerable to the failures of man still. He was curious then, he was curious now, and it killed him as Keyes refused to regard him and instead push a tactical plan for landing on Installation 03 to the other UNSC ships jumping in from Slipspace.

"Thank you, for everything, Guilty Spark." Cortana had said. "Chief?"

Before Guilty Spark had even been able to respond he felt hands clamp around him, a great magnetic, electrical force bringing him down to the ground in a clatter of metal.

It was the Master Chief himself, and what he had put on him was-

"Armor restraint. Short circuits much of any system. To be used for rampant Spartans… Then again I don't think the Master Chief here worries much of any of us." She coyly commented, hand at her cheek as the Spartan knelt down to secure Spark. The Monitor, for all of its will, could not move, his repulsors frozen, locked up. This was a fate worse than death if he was left like this, but fortunately humans knew mercy.

This entire thing, what they were doing here, it was defined by mercy. Not by the abundance of, but by the lack. After thirty years, no mercy was to be given as every human there who knew what Halo did saw, behold, a pale horse. They were the riders, and its name was death.

Guilty Spark struggled pitifully, and for a moment, the Chief hesitated. He sounded so much like a man.

"What will you do? Please, tell me that at least." He begged.

John-117 only had one thing to say as he leaned in to disable the Monitor. _**"Light it."**_

The horror in 343 Guilty Spark's eyes was palpable, even as he, a construct, could put off.

"A tactical pulse would eradicate any life in 25,000 light-years around this installation! The Rings were not meant to-!"

The Halos were never meant to be used as weapons against mortals. Only against the horror of Flesh, against the Flood. The Librarian never intended for the Mantle of Responsibility to be taken like this, to confirm every fear her husband, the Didact, confided in her about humanity.

The Covenant War was never supposed to end this way.

Every protest, and more, would not be heard from 343 Guilty Spark as the UNSC fleet moved in to Installation 03. Its range was perfect: skirting human territory, just barely, but encompassing all of the Covenant. What human colonies that did fall in range? Acceptable losses.

If 343 could've screamed, he would've, but instead he was put into stasis, and the genocide that came was one that the Guardians themselves could not stop.

One day later, humanity won the war.


	12. 1-6: Before Demons - City of God

A/N:

pbluekan said: "_I actually like your prose. It really speaks to the reflective and introspective nature of the story. It makes the whole thing feel very human and very much about the development of Mai and JD as people._

_However, you tend to repeat things. A lot. Lone wolf, Hyper-lethal-vector, and the sentences that contain them are identical and repeat far too often in my opinion. We know what Ackerson used her for. You've repeated it a dozen times."_

**Roger and understood, I admit I repeat things a lot because I want you to know that there is emphasis for a reason, but I hear ya, I'm just being overzealous. Thanks for the call out!**

Lanzador said:_ "This chapter serves as an excellent display of why the humans of Halo survived and the ones of ME died. So much 'optimist' and 'openness' here almost suffocated the character interactions, as Shepard and her ideology condescends to the Haloverse: we can be better._

_Never mind that they are perfectly reasonable beliefs based on experiences. Her character reads more as a immature child who never outgrew the no loser/winner mentality. I'd only hope that at least Six gets involved with Cerberus. But based on what I've read so far, I'm sure she'll immediately default to Shepard-Jesus' judgement. 'Bad xenophobes, bad!'"_

**Shepard's optimism in the face of a galaxy of adversity is pretty central to her character, and at least for literary purposes it provides a very nice contrast to two human characters who were on the back pedal and in a constant state of desperation. But as is inherent to Shepard as a videogame character, this Shepard is my own. There's a... more SOF side of her that I hint in the last chapter and in this one. The type of side that I collude with modern day SOF and is a side that _needs _to be balanced by her optimism. In Manifest Destiny I explore the psyche of these type of SOF people through the lens of a battered America, and in short, these people are not healthy, they're not kind, and what they do as a career is not meant to help people. Shepard does help people. Killing is a failure, after all.**

_On a single Halo firing: _Admittedly I'm playing fast and loose with Halo rules, but also there's precedent. If Professor Anders in Halo Wars 2 can straight up castrate a Halo, I'm pretty sure Cortana can isolate the Halo's signal and keep the arrays from firing en-masse. Or at least, I assume so, and this story assumes so.

RadioPoisoning said: _"__Are the 3s all so maladjusted or is Mai special? It feels like she's begging for someone to give her a reason to commit some localized genocide."_

**Generally I hope I've made it clear that Mai is maladjusted. You see this type of... blood lust, if I should say, reflected in fellow Noble Emile. Now the 3s were not, as a whole kindly treated, but it didn't stop some stand-up people like Carter, Tom, and Lucy from maturing into fine people. But inherently as Noble Six, the Lone Wolf, she is special. Violence and her effectiveness as violence has molded her into the a monster made of man, and her upbringings didn't help. Again, "Do you believe the Master Chief succeeded because he was at his core broken?" Well Mai, being our surrogate for John, being his equal, is also similarly broken.**

The Watchers Network said: "Why did Spark activate the defenses? Were the UNSC forces strong enough to stop the Covenant forces from holding the ring?"

**My interpretation of Halo CE:A's first terminal was that Spark was to invite the PoA in, if it hadn't been for the Covenant interfering. So if the Chief's Geas was confirmed as Reclaimer, inheritor, then I believe Spark would've activated 04's defenses in order to aid them. Also a bigger fleet was with the PoA, so I assume combined with Keyes' tactical intuition, Thel Vadam would've been bested.**

_In general: _ **Expect this story to be in more bite size chunks when we get into the Normandy and the main game as a whole, but again, as is my style, a lot of set up happens in this intro. Also expect less Halo-universe side of things going on during the duration. It's not going to disappear, but I need stuff to, well, stew for a bit. That and it's better off not developed at the forefront. This is an ME story first and I'm going to bring it back in soon enough.**

* * *

** _Section 1-6_ **

** _Before Demons - City of God_ **

* * *

They stripped him bare, and in that moment the Covenant, the UNSC, Marines and Civilians alike, knew that the idea of humanity being on the backstep was over. They stripped him bare and the Elites, knowing who he was, knew that ruin had come to their people as he stood before the entirety of humanity, lead out of the prison block he was in.

How ironic it had been: only the Covenant on human colonies or attacking, deep within UNSC space, had been spared from the Great Journey. The reality of what the Great Journey was had been revealed in the cruelest terms to the survivors. That Truth, and Mercy, and Regret all held onto a lie for thirty years on who, truly, were the heirs to the Forerunners. The Great Journey itself? A lie. A procedure. 2000 years had been robbed of the Sangheili, the Unggoy, the Kig-Yar, and all those who had come into the Covenant. An insult of the greatest tragedy that was only itself eclipsed by the fact that a Holocaust unlike any other had ended the very idea of the Covenant.

Any who had fallen under the sins of the Prophets? They had paid dearly in the most absolute.

A cruelty that, then and there, after all had been done to Earth and her Colonies, was _justified_.

That was the pain Thel Vadamee, now Vadam, had to bear as human estimates from the Great Journey drawn from abandoned Covenant ships drifting in the Empire had been given to him. As punishment, as torture, and as penance.

"I'm sorry for your loss." Fleet Admiral Lord Terrence Hood had tried to consul Vadam. Though it was all platitudes as the Elite was forced onto his knees on that space station over the human homeworld, and stood before those who would preside over his judgement, his sentencing, his trial and hearing.

Vadam was a strong Elite, far stronger than he himself knew. He had led fleets to the edge of human space, destroying any chance of a victory for the UNSC in that war with a calculated fanaticism that highlighted his very servitude to the Gods, and the Prophets. Their righteous Crusade was led by him, sometimes personally, into battle. His gold armor, now cast asides and almost claimed as a trophy, cast him as a hero for his people, and for the Covenant.

In another life, he would have been _**Arbiter**_.

This was not that life however.

This was the life where-

"Less than 500,000 of my people remain, _human._" He spoke for the first time in that court room, the bright lighting and the cameras surrounding him flashing as he spoke the language of man. There was scorn and sorrow and horror in his words. "Less than 500,000." And then it was filled with a sob as his restrained hands raised up the few inches they were allowed only to slam back to the steel floor, the weight of several hundred billion dead Sangheili now bared by his heart. 500,00 had been a generous estimate, a great measure less than what had been present on a CSO-Class super carrier. It was almost insulting that only that many remained of his people.

The war hadn't stopped the second the Sacred Ring had been fired by the humans. Far from it.

There had been no unified command or leader to proclaim that to continue fighting was for nothing, that their entire lives had been a lie. Covenant forces that had been engaged on planets far and wide throughout the Orion Arm in battles that would've otherwise been an overwhelming victory were, suddenly, and all at once, cut off from any further support from outside human space. High Charity had gone dark. The supply routes and logistics infrastructure of the Empire stopping all at once as reinforcements ceased to come and instead, in their place, brought forth human armadas fighting back with something the Covenant had never seen before: Victory.

It had been so long, and it had never happened for that matter, since the option of offering surrender to the enemy had been entertained.

So, the UNSC came to the worlds under siege, worlds taken, who had been caught outside of the Great Journey, and all at once humanity had reclaimed what it had lost at the price of galaxy of corpses.

It was only then when it was revealed that Thel Vadam, having been recovered as a prisoner during the Pillar of Autumn's defense of Installation 04, had been the last remaining Supreme Commander of the Covenant, humanity had finally decided to use him to broadcast all at once: everything.

Every lie, every truth, and, in the end, the option to make peace or die.

How many Sangheili had committed suicide upon hearing his message? It had kept Vadam awake for days, near catatonic as the humans kept him in a cell along with the last remaining authority figures of the Covenant as a whole.

A concept had been introduced to him then and there about the idea of what happens after a war: What the victors did.

He, and all those like him, even as they lived as the last of their species, were being tried as _War Criminals_.

How ironic.

With his eyes watered, red with disgust and a very blackness in his soul which filled him with a sadness he didn't know how he survived, they looked up again at that line of humans behind their stands, rendering judgement.

"You dare judge me, after all you've done?!" Vadam raged against his chains, and, out of the corner of his eyes, along the glass walls of that space station which had done everything to provide the backdrop of Earth, he saw the original monsters of man: the Demons. They were all recalled now, back from their wars, brought back to Earth and gathered, for the first time since their training, together. The purpose they were trained for, for the Insurrection, had not been the one that had created them and their legend.

In their armor, they shadowed over all, and that shadow threatened to cast itself over Vadam in that court room.

In between the jurors, the reporters, those who had simply wanted to be there to see history, his vision caught some their numbers on their chest plates:

010

025

051

058

062

087

104

117.

Vadam recognized 117. He was the Demon that restrained him, and for that, Vadam could do nothing but glare at the Demon through his visor as he stood at attention, and yet ready for anything.

"Humanity as a whole deeply regrets the usage of the Halo rings. As we have regretted going to war, to meet you and your people in battle, Admiral Vadamee." Lord Hood spoke in his slow tone, to make sure that the Elite before him, bowed to them all, would understand exactly what he was saying.

Vadam snapped is head to Lord Hood. "You would have me accept your genocide as righteous?!"

"As we would accept yours, with the facts known to you at the time, as such." Admiral Margaret Panagosky was the most dangerous woman in all of the UNSC. Not by sheer combat ability or any particularly lethal aspect of her. She was not a Spartan, after all. Ruthlessness, curtness and responsibility carried with professionalism hadn't even been a part of it. Not even the fact that she had been the Commander-In-Chief of the Office of Naval Intelligence itself. No. The reason why she had been the most dangerous woman in all of the UNSC was because she had done all this, presided over humanity's sins, and still knew what right and wrong was.

She was better than the Spartans.

That was why she had been on those stands and not John-117, or Kurt-051, or Naomi-058, or any of them at all.

The others that had been on those stands: the highest judges of the UEG and those deemed worthy to judge, either by loss, or by virtue.

Vadam sneered at her. "What do you call the murderers that accuse others of murder?"

Hypocrites. "Our sins do not negate yours, Admiral Vadamee. The ethics of our usage of the Halos are not hidden from us." Parangosky looked like a skull given life: an older woman whose age had only given her lines on her face that accentuated the seriousness of her life. "For thirty years humanity has had to deal with the very reality that extinction was on its doorstep, that Earth itself could've seen the fleets, _your fleets, _deliver ruin to our species for the simple reason of our existence. We did what we had to do."

Vadam shot a glance to all those on the stands. "What formalities do you dare insult me with."

"This is your sentencing." Lord Hood had said with all due process, no malice to be given.

"And what am I accused of by this court?"

"Murder."

Vadam had been forced, with more than half a trillion dead women, men, and children of his people thrown at his feet, to recognize that humanity had never been the heretics. If anything, _he had been the Heretic._ Humanity had been the heirs to everything: to the Mantle of Responsibility and the Covenant itself. Even in his ignorance, even with what he knew now, he had to pay the ultimate price.

"You know I would've never done this to you, if I had known."

"Then tell me what you have done to us."

He stamped out humans like vermin, like rats. They were nothing more than a statistic, if not a justification for him to go to war and fulfill his heritage as a Sangheili warrior. He knew exactly what he had done to humanity, and to put it into word would've just damned him more.

If not he however, someone would reiterate his injustices.

A man stepped out from the dark, dressed in his dress uniform. He was a darker man, perhaps the darkest figure in that room, even with the black of space above them. His jaw was tight, his face was stone, and in his words came evidence. "We've tracked you for years, Supreme Commander, from Rubble, to Reach. We knew everything you did in the name of your Great Journey."

"What have I done then human?"

The dark man was happy to oblige, but he looked to his superiors above to confirm. Parangosky offered her palm to him in a swift gesture. "Agent Locke, do proceed."

"Thel Vadamee is responsible for the casualties of at least one billion humans and the loss of seven fully developed planets. One hundred and twenty-three fleet vessels and twenty-three thousand fleet personnel have been killed by his orders. He was the Covenant's most dangerous tactical asset in the war."

_The war. _It had barely been a week and they spoke of it as if it happened years ago. No document signed, no final planet taken: just death and death itself.

Locke went on, describing battles he had taken part in, planets that had fallen because of him. The exacting scrutiny of his tactics that lead to the most human dead above all. The public crowd stirred, and all those tuning in, they had wanted his head.

"If this war was still continuing, and you were before this court, it is in the opinion of this agent that Vadamee be executed with all due diligence, for the sake of Humanity."

His history was reiterated to him by this man. In another life he would've become a hunter of Spartans. In this life however, he became the executioner of Thel Vadamee.

He spoke in certainty. In facts that Vadam hadn't even known about himself. Even then however, it spoke to a fact he had been become particularly aware of ever since the Prophets were deemed as vermin as traitors to them: his life had not been his own. And yet they were to act on him for it. There was no way out of here he had decided. But, at the very least, he could talk, he could plead for the sanity of the stars.

As he started, trying his best to bring himself to humanity's eye level, there was a croakiness in his voice, a pleading. "My fate may be determined, and what you humans shall do to me, inconsequential. But have you no knowledge of what you have truly done?! Using the weapons of our forebearers in such fashion?! Damning my people. Do you see yourselves as Gods? Or do you see yourselves as righteous?"

Humanity had been heirs to the Forerunners. What that meant to the Covenant in all of its thousands of year history, it had meant yes, they had been gods. To admit as such would be to fall however. Those on the stands stirred into silence, Lord Hood, a grim look, curved into his mouth, knew exactly what Vadam had been asking them.

They used the powers afforded to them to save themselves, yes. To do that however, it had been to commit galactic genocide. They hadn't even communicated to the Covenant warning them. They simply just did.

It was ironic, the name of the station they were on then, as this procession was held.

Lord Hood had shifted his white admiral cap for comfort, in the same stroke, looking out at Earth, staring back at them. It looked different now, without the prospect of war before them all. All those defense initiatives, shipyards filled to the brim with hulls of warships, black projects known only to him and Parangosky besides him… They all seemed to fall away like meat from a bone. There was a warship, out in the Oort Cloud, being built in secrecy he remembered then and there, and it gave him great peace to know that it would be a warship built to live a life outside of war. UNSC Infinity's true purpose then, seemed so distant now. Closer was the city that this space station was in geosynchronus orbit with.

"This space station is named for the city that it lies over: Nuremberg. And as then, half a millennium ago, so remains as truth now: Orders do not justify evil. You will not escape your sins for following your leaders, your Prophets." Hood's words seemed haunted. Hypocrisy being swallowed by him for the sake of being human.

Those that committed the genocide, the holocaust of the Covenant, were the victors.

"And in that breadth then, humans, do ends justify means?" He said, kneeling before Demons.

Parangosky shot a look to the Spartans as the Elite spoke to them. _Perhaps_, she thought, but she would never admit it. "Tell me, Vadamee, you come from a martial culture, where orders matter and you are expected to follow them, am I not correct?" She spoke to him. He nodded, slowly, unsure of where she was going. "But also, tell me then, does your culture-" She paused, unsure of whether or not to refer to the Sangheili in the past tense. "Does your culture recognize a measure of right and wrong based on moral and ethical standards?"

"Yes."

"Do you know of honor?" That word. It defined Sangheili culture as a whole. To be honorable was to be alive, to know true your own life and what that life meant to all.

"Yes." Vadam stressed, almost insulted.

"Then would you know of times in your history when, despite orders, there were those who refused to carry them out on their honor as Sangheili?"

Kaidons of Sangheilios's past, Arbiters of history. Not all of them had been great and wise. Some had been tyrants, struck down by those who would dare stand against them. Their martial culture was a culture of might made right, but there had always been a wrong. Honor had been that baseline. To have it, or to not have it. No Elite worth his blade would do wrong, would be dishonorable. There was a right and wrong that the Sangheili had that the humans knew all too well. The Sangheili sense of morality was no more alien to the humans than the human morality was to them.

That was where they all spoke from now: the victors.

But even then, in their modern time, Vadam had thought of those that were known as heretics. Even in death, wherever they had been in that galaxy, they were vindicated by the Great Journey. The Ussans, led by Ussa Xellus, had at the early years of the Covenant led a legion of Sangheili in defiance against the Covenant: _"The Great Journey. Where is your proof of this Journey, for anyone but the Forerunners? We hold these relics to be precious and sacred, but we use them ourselves in this very world. It is the freedom, the independence of our people that we fight for!" _As was recorded in his notes by a dead Prophet. Ussa's words were hollow to Vadam then, when he learned of them. But now they had meant the world: it had meant about how wrong all of them were and just how right those they called sinners had been.

"I know what is right, and what is wrong, human." He seemed so close to crying. Not as a man or child does however. But as a leader of his people, for his people did. He feared for not his life, but for the Sangheili as a whole. Whatever happened to him, he would allow it: to repay the travesties of the Covenant. He would be the monument to all their sins. He had to be. "But what could I have done? The Covenant has been the way of my people for millennia."

He asked, not as a question for them, but as a question for himself. Had the humans been able to see all that long?

"You should have known what loss really means." Victory defeated them. Loss after loss, battle after battle, the humans knew the cost of victory. The Covenant would never know. Not when they were all dead now. That is what Lord Hood had said.

Vadam shook his chains and damned it for having no slack, keeping him kneeled on the floor like a slave. "You dare say I do not know the pain of seeing my Elites die in battle?"

"Not enough."

This UNSC never saw the Covenant splinter over Delta Halo. They never met the humbled Thel Vadam, having become Arbiter and seen his people, first hand, be cast asides by the Prophet. This galaxy never saw the UNSC and the Elites make amends with a common goal: to stop the Prophet of Truth ignite the Halos from the Ark. Thel Vadam had been as alien as the word would allow, and they had him on his knees.

In truth, they wanted him to beg for his life. There was no true case here. No judge, no representation for him. His fate had long been decided the second the Halo was fired. Humanity wanted spectacle from a species that had caused so much pain, so many generations lost.

In a conflict, in South East Asia, nearly half a millennium ago, the American Commander said this about his opponent: _"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient." _In that war America killed 1.5 million of those "Orientals".

What humanity could do against an enemy, otherized, dehumanized, had been unthninkable. When the Halos presented themselves and the enemy was literally inhuman, the option was easy, that far into the war, that close to defeat.

"Read then: What of the Brute Chieftan? Atriox? How was he able to discern and break away from the Covenant after knowing about the loss of his people? A Brute, no less." He felt as if a finger had been poking his chest with how Paragosky had pointed out the other enemy of the Covenant: of a faction gone rogue, against the Prophets. Again, Vadam felt so wrong, it damned him. "Were you blinded?"

"Blinded?" Vadam blanked.

"Paralyzed?" Parangosky went on. "Dumbstruck?"

Hood had reached a hand out to Parangosky, several seats down, telling her to calm, for he had words to say: "You were one of the Covenant's most treasured instruments. You led your fleet against us without mercy, and to your faith… but your inability to see the evils that you wrought upon us as another, living, sentient species, and your inability to see the evils of your Prophets makes your trial without note. You are guilty. You have been guilty for as long as you were a commander of the Covenant. There is no trial we can perform without disrespecting the billions of our dead. You are here today, brought before us, so we can tell you what will be done to you. That is the justice which your service to the Covenant has ordained to you."

Perhaps then it was a double-edged sword that, of all the species of that former Covenant, it had been the Prophets themselves that had suffered the worst fate. Only sixteen remained alive. Sixteen that hadn't been caught in the firing of Halo or the inquisition taken out upon the Jiralhanae and Sangheili crews upon the truth of The Great Journey being revealed. Those who hadn't been taken by Halo were unlucky, based on how those Sangheili that had evaded capture by the UNSC so far had gone off hunting down the last of the Prophets that hadn't been accounted for by anyone.

None were of note. They just wanted them dead.

"I remember how this war started, what your kind did to mine." There was a coldness in Lord Hood's words as he stared down at Vadam, into his very soul, into the very last strike he could use to attack at the Covenant. Vadam was the Covenant now; or, at least, all that remained of it. "_I can't forgive you."_

Nothing more. Nothing less. There was to be no forgiving here. No reconciliation.

"None of us can." As was the shared opinion of all those who were to judge. To be fair, and frank, for once they spoke for all of humanity. From Insurrectionist to those who actually called Earth home, nothing would be forgiven. Thel Vadam would not be forgiven.

Not one person there had made a sound. Not a reporter, a judge, Marine, or Spartan could. It was the sound of something like a black hole: taking all within its maw. Nothing could escape

So that was that. Vadam breathed against the cold floor as his head touched upon it, insanity waved off. He would take his fate with destiny, and if the humans would damn his race to death, then he too would follow with honor. His honor was all he had now.

"If you shall kill me, then I shall choose my executioner."

He looked to the Spartans. He looked to the rigid 117, and, distantly, the two met gazes. Vadam gestured toward him as best he could. "He is the Demon who had bested me once before. It is only right that he do so."

The panel of judges had all looked to one another solemnly, pitifully.

"I'm afraid not." Said one of the judges. "You may point to our barbarities, but we will not pursue revenge for the sake of revenge. We cannot be like that to you."

_What?_

Vadam turned urgently to the judges. "Do not toy with me, humans. Whether you shall torture me to death, or shoot me right here, at the back of my head, tell me. You will kill me, yes?"

"No." Humans truly were without mercy. The man that spoke up had been aresponsible for more than three quarters of the Spartans in that room. None of them that the IIs recognized: It had been Colonel James Ackerson. Progenitor of the Spartan-IIIs themselves. "What we did to your species was regrettable, but we did it not to eliminate the Sangheili as a whole. Just to end the war."

His mind ran as if it was in Slipspace, what were the humans doing to him? His eyes were wide and his four mandibles pulsed. The equivalent of a human with their mouth agape.

"Your sentence is not one of cruelty. It is of opportunity. It is how we forgive you." They spoke in lies and platitude, coming through the mouth of Lord Hood. "What we did, we did in the name of peace. For us, and for you."

How many children and women had been killed? Not only in his species but in all of those in the Covenant? What had been _lost_ because of the Human's _victory?_

James Ackerson was to be the head of a new branch of the UNSC, centered around the Spartans. However, that was only after the shake, the plans of those that came before him brought to the public and the fallout dealt with. In that time then, he would be military governor of a world. He would become military governor of-

"Sanghelios will become a prison world as you rebuild. We will relocate the survivors of your people there so that you shall begin again. Sangheili will not be allowed space travel for this duration, and any of those that shall travel, shall travel on UNSC business, not your own. For you, it shall be a prison. For your children, it shall be a prison. Only in several generations time, when you have rebuilt, when the scars of this war fade and you recognize where you stand in this galaxy now, without the Covenant, we will free you to the stars as equals with humanity. That is the sentence of the Sangheili as a whole."

The Grunts, the Hunters, the Brutes and Jackals, they got off easy. They were ascended, in a sense, by the Covenant. They fell apart without them. The Jackals would go back to raiding space lanes, justifying the wages of the UNSC Navy. The Brutes would bomb themselves back to oblivion when they were done hunting the last of the Prophets (or rumors of). The Hunters would recede back into their technological caches and the Grunts would finally find their peace. One master was as good as another.

But the Sangheili had been the second longest standing member of it, and for that, they would bear the brunt.

"I would rather die, than be equal to you. After all you've done." There was an implication; a threat there, spit through teeth and written in blood. His own blood.

Ackerson smirked, folding his hands together. "If you shall take your life, if you shall die, then let it be known that you fail your people a second time: robbing them of someone who could help them survive and, eventually, put them on track toward coming back into the light of peace and justice."

That was his punishment: to live.

"What do you mean?!"

"You will be leader of the Sangheili at our behest."

"You would dare puppet us?" He really would've just died than see his people reduced to that, but his life was not his own anymore.

Lord Hood nodded. "A provisional government for the survivors shall be set up by our humane societies in conjunction with the UNSC until you have developed without the Covenant and see the truth."

It would kill them all, and for the first time Thel Vadam thought about his people and how alone in history they had been. "We have no doctors. No engineers. No farmers or teachers!" What happened when someone, an entire civilization no less, had been focused toward a glorious end? Been focused toward the glory of being a warrior? The rest atrophied, went away, died.

"And so that is why you shall start from scratch."

History was written by victors. The world was controlled by its conquerors. What choice did Vadam have? This was the world he was living in, the life that was forced upon him: Imperial peace.

"Gods." He spoke to himself. He spoke to the floor, only to see his own reflection in it. "Gods what went wrong? _**What happened**_?" Vadam should've known better to be speaking to his gods, after all that time. They didn't exist anymore. If anything, his gods were made of man. Though he tried, tried so hard as his forehead touched the floorhead again as if in Islamic prayer, trying to push his way through it, through reality, to spare him from that life. No one answered his questions. No one would.

Screams, his screams bounced off of metal and glass. Off of ears and flesh and men and women and Spartans as humanity saw Thel Vadam break, trying to rationalized all that had been done to him. Rocking back and forth on his knees, his head tapping the ground, it didn't take long for him to rock harder, for those taps to turn into bangs and his skull bounce against metal as best he could.

Rhythmic, like a metronome: the sound of screaming and despair. It was all in tune to a Sangheili who felt like he was being buried alive.

Hood motioned to the guards: ODSTs and Locke. They had electric batons, and one strike from Locke across Vadam's back had locked him up as the ODSTs took his shoulders and dragged him away.

Screaming, screaming, but no god was listening.

"Kill me! Please! Just kill me! Spare me from this life!"

And he begged, and he begged, and he begged for death. He begged as he was dragged out of the court by the ODSTs, his hoof like feet dragging a line in the steel, forever marring it as his screams devolved into a mess of a being. His voice reached into a crescendo, echoing forever into the hearts of all those that had to bear witness to an Elite plead to let him go for the suffering of his own existence. For then, even worse, it was they that had been keeping them alive.

When the giant doors closed with a clang of steel, the reverb shook the bones of every who were there. They did not do this for pleasure. This was for righteousness and justice.

As they said, however, justice was blind.

"Alright, bring in the next one." The eagerness in Parangosky's voice had betrayed all of them there but those who truly knew. The Spartans had not been one of them. This case, this one that was coming, had been regardless of the War. There was a time, finally, for the question to be tackled and the idea of the Spartans to be answered.

_She _was to be the one to answer for it.

In another world, the Spartans would've done something. The war would've gone on too long, ended in a different way, and set up a different galaxy to allow them to understand what it meant to follow orders truly. They were men and women, with names, not numbers. They knew orders and would follow them to a degree only seen in the religious zealotry of the Elite at his knees now. The cookie crumbled in a way that had damned them all however. They were on the winning side, they would never be tested in such a way that would make them question their orders. They were more machine than man, and none of them would question that now.

Just like they were designed, they did nothing as their creator was walked, cuffs in her hand and ODSTs escorting her to be before that court.

The irony was thick, and then damning.

Ackerson smirked as his Spartan-IIIs in the room stood ramrod straight.

The UNSC would not execute any Covenant, but for their own? A different fate awaited them.

_**"Doctor Catherine Halsey." **_Parangosky greeted the greyed scientist.

Halsey had no time for formalities, understanding them better than Thel Vadam that the jury and judges were stacked against her. Funny, she thought, she would find herself on the same level as the Covenant. She spat on the steel floor. _**"Just shoot me and be done with it."**_

The only solace that Halsey had was that humanity as a whole, who would dare put her on trial like this, besides the enemy, would be judged someday. She had only hoped that they remembered her when they burned.

On an installation, far from Earth…

An ancient evil awakens.

* * *

If Mai had to be honest, to see Earth in all of its glory, in its blue and green so unlike any other world in the Milky Way, so heavenly and healing to her as a human, it had been more impressive to her than this construct. This multi armed clam-shell of an engineering marvel that was built by gods from the before times. The galaxy had inherited it, and called it the Citadel.

Though perhaps she had tricked herself into thinking it hadn't been impressive or awe inspiring to her. The Citadel, after all, was decidedly a "normal" part of galactic life here. So she had paid no mind that it was held in an almost heavenly, lavender section of place in a cloud, or how it had been guarded by a collective fleet of every major alien race in that galaxy in a harmonious function that would've made her scoff at back in her reality. She especially didn't care that on each of those massive arms, nearly forty kilometers long with outward developments that would make even Earth pale, several million had made it their home, adorned with natural habitats and cities formed into wards that were very much livable. This was the heart of the Galaxy and she could not afford to be impressed as a security officer in the designated Alliance station looked her up and down as she posed like a T in the transfer station.

It was okay though, JD could be awed and impressed for her as he stood on the docks of the Citadel, almost as if he was aloft in space itself.

But yet again this was only because he was given time to stand in awe at the station around them, taking it all in.

When the Normandy had first arrived, it came escorted, fighters from several different Navy's flying it in until C-Sec took it over and guided them in. If this was the heart of the galaxy, then the eyes of the galaxy had cast themselves on the crew of the Normandy as its docking bay opened and the ship was flooded by aliens and humans alike. All of them there because of what happened on Eden Prime.

They came like a flood, like the tidal wave on Altis that had whisked Mai and JD away, this trove of people from other worlds had been a battle, inevitable, that had to be fought by them.

Not that anyone else could've told as they hid behind their armor, their helmets. JD's arms had been tucked around himself as Mai's hands, for everyone's safety there, were clamped at her hip. The same words cycled through her mind as if she was telling herself to breath: _No one needs to die here. No one needs to die here. I don't have to kill anyone._

When a Turian had bumped his shoulder into Mai's chest, JD didn't know he had responded the way he did. He hadn't even prepared for the idea of Mai snapping an innocent person's neck because they had been alien, but, as it turned out, he had innately knew what to do as they stood next to each other by the dividing wall of the chow table.

"Sorry." The Turian had brushed off, hadn't even looked at the armored monster his gear bumped into. It also meant he didn't see the way JD's hand latched onto Mai's left wrist in a quick motion. Their vision had honed in on that, all of their senses drawn away from the world outside and brought back in: to that connection. Of cloth on steel. A gloved and uniformed hand touching an armored wrist.

She depolarized her visor, and JD hadn't gotten used to it. He definitely hadn't gotten used to her eyes: vibrantly blue, almost electric. There was an impression of sorrow in them, how they sunk in and widened, just a bit, surprised that he did do what he did.

Did he really not have that faith in her?

He opened his mouth. It was his turn to keep his visor polarized, but he said nothing as his hand left her wrist and fell limply to his side.

She could handle legions of enemies, entire planets, colonies, all out to kill her. She could deal with a new social understanding.

Even though there had been an armored gauntly and a body suit between his own gloved fingers and her skin, she felt it burn to it. She wondered what it must've felt like when she nearly broke his arm, the first time they were face to face with an Asari and Turian, back in New Buffalo. No one who felt her pain lived to recount it. No one but him.

He turned his head away, shaking it, hands returning to his gun as he found something to distract himself from the guests onboard. He found Shepard, weakly walking, but walking, as she walked a medical stretcher with its bubble-like capsule out with several C-Sec personnel and several Spectres.

One of them, a Salarian, had barred her as the procession entered the elevator of the Normandy, up and out. "I'm sorry, human, but we have it from here." Nihlus was alive, barely, but he had made it to the Citadel at least. In his voice, in his black eyes, had been failure reflected upon Shepard. The woman knew what they had thought: that the first second the life of one of their own was held by a human, the human had failed.

She wasn't some peckish school girl trying to win back her man. She was a Marine, an SOF soldier, who knew what it meant to fail. So she sucked in her gums, put on a hard face, and stepped back, letting that section of C-Sec roll out as Anderson was dealing with another procession grilling him over the loss of Prothean technology over her shoulder.

The entire contingent of Marines on the Normandy had been armored up, standing in those halls at the ready as the guests were over. It wasn't proper procedure for every Citadel government to be inside humanity's newest starship, but there were more pressing matters.

"As I said the mission report will be issued to the appropriate authorities by our Embassy. I cannot answer any of your questions at this time." Anderson had basically yelled at the procession, forcing them into the elevator as a wave of silent came over the Normandy like a beach after a wave. Nihlus being alive had forced their hand, and for that, the investigation would begin.

Anderson turned to Shepard, arms crossed. "I'm sorry."

She raised an eyebrow, tired, but still coherent enough. "Sorry for what?"

"All this. This Spectre business and the Protheans."

She blew out air from her cheeks, staring at those closed elevator doors and their hum as they took the guests out to the upper deck and then out. "Nothing you could've done sir. Who could've accounted for the Geth, eh?"

He waved his hand as he turned around back to his quarters. "I know, I know. I just can't help but feel bad about throwing you and the crew into the middle of this." And there were still in the thick of it still. "Commander, gear up, we're going to the embassy once we let this situation calm down. About an hour or so. All those who were on your fireteam are with us."

It'd be her first time on the Citadel truly, and seeing it through the viewports of the Normandy had been exciting enough. If it hadn't been for the fact she failed the galaxy, she would've been a little more cheery. "Aye captain." Her nod was short and sweet. Less than twenty four hours after she had gone to ground on a colony under siege and knocked into a coma because of it, she would have to gear up and answer for it.

Anderson disappeared back into his quarters as the Marines on guard gave a collective sigh. Dealing with that many people on the ship had been trying, especially since most of them had been alien.

Kaiden had been one of them, approaching Shepard as the Captain melted away to god knows what. There was a sympathetic look on his face, but it went away with Sheaprd's return to duty. She couldn't sulk, still, he had to ask. "Were you looking forward to being a Spectre?"

She shrugged. She was already geared up and her dominant hand rested on her pistol at her hip, the back of it being layed on by her palm like a gunman from the old American West. "Wasn't in my career path before, still ain't now if I'm being honest. 'Specially if this the shit we get into."

Ashley had been on guard, having fully taken her role as a new addition to the Marine contingent in, posted by the Med Bay, chatting idly with Chakwas now. When Shepard caught her gaze the steely Marine gave her an acknowledging nod. Palming her cheek, Shepard couldn't help but comment. "To think we have the blood of a Williams on board."

"Bodes well." Kaiden almost wanted to take back the comment as soon as he said it aloud, but it didn't reach Ashley's ears.

"She'll be a fine addition. Still, if anyone's bringing trouble to this ship, it ain't going to be her."

"They'll be fine." They thought they were on the same wavelength, but they hadn't been. Shepard looked at him alarmed.

"Was talking 'bout myself, Lieutenant." Kaiden had been talking about the two Frogmen on the otherside of the wall. He kept his tongue, rolling his head, nervously glancing at that wall, as if past it. "There something I should know?"

If she was asking a question she already knew the answer. Of course there was something she should know. That entire damned day she had needed to know things. She needed to know why the Geth had attacked them. She needed to know from the horses mouth why Jenkins had been left behind. She needed to know if that Prothean Beacon had done something to her, and, most of all, as she dismissed Kaiden, obviously unwilling to talk, she needed to know what had been done to her.

She felt it in her bones, in her mind's eye, that something had been done to her. She hadn't dreamed describing her visions to Chakwas and her staff, they forwarded her the recordings of her own voice after all. In that rush of coming to the Citadel, surrendering Nihlus and being in the galactic point of view at its very heart, she could hardly return to her own mind until now. It made her drift, drift to the mess table before Mai and JD and taking a seat weakly. Her armor didn't play well with the seats, but it didn't matter, burying her face in her hands and closing her eyes.

Seeing the blackness of her own eyes, she tried her best to recall, to remember, the visions. She could only remember the feelings, truly, of fear and hopelessness: horror. The abyss had come out and taken her by the neck while she was in the dark, and she, for her own sanity, had blocked out that memory.

Most of them that is.

"Commander Shepard?" Mai cast her shadow over Shepard, approaching her from the back.

"I'm fine, Chief Gul." She breathed out, head still in hands, facing the table beneath. "Just been a lot."

"You okay Shepard?"

JD had been more liable to abide by her request, by the name she just wanted them all to called her. Just Shepard. He looked up at him, lips in a thin line, her green eyes tired. The sleeper pods had looked so enticing but she was going to be busy in an hour, and the pods didn't play with well short naps. "I saw the worst shit I ever seen in my life, JD."

His head bobbed lightly. "So you told us."

"All this stuff, with Spectres and the mission, I feel like I'm getting distracted. I mean, _I mean_, it's staying with me, but I don't know exactly what I saw." Metal and flesh. That's what she saw, anything more and she would lose her words to describe. Maybe she couldn't describe it in words. "I mean, the stuff that came before the city. That kidnapping, I know sure as shit what that was."

"Ma'am?" Mai wasn't quite sure what Shepard knew, what she was getting at. Had she known that the person she had seen get kidnapped was her?

"Level with me, Chiefs," She looked to both of them before repalming her head. "You ever think you became someone else's nightmare?"

JD never fought the Insurrection, and not many Covenant had lived to tell the tale of ODSTs. The Covenant never surrendered. If he was a nightmare, he was a nightmare in waking daylights, clad in the black armor that made him a shock trooper.

Mai on the other hand. She took the question into herself, and Shepard noticed. Shepard had noticed very intently as Mai blanked behind her helmet. She pressed on, and in that moment JD knew that Shepard was looking for something from her.

"Tell me, Chief Gul, if you were witness to a kidnapping, out in the sticks, where armed men were involved, what would you do?" She had become the knife's edge of ONI for so long, dismantling the Insurrection in methods she knew were inhumane. She'd never kidnapped however. It was never pertinent to her goals of elimination with extreme prejudice, however her only experience with kidnapping had been…

JD's words echoed in her head in the same way the visions echoed in Shepard's.

She thanked him, for saying that he would've stopped those ONI agents, but it was only a platitude. She didn't think of what she really felt. She didn't think about it from his point of view. Shepard wanted it however. Shepard wanted to know, having been in that situation which JD had described.

To break down a Spartan was a task not done all at once. It came in chips, in words, and in moments. Moments that they couldn't rely on tactical training and knowledge to confront that break down.

"What if kidnapping the child was important?"

_What the fuck?_

For both Shepard and JD, they had both thought the same as those words flowed out of Mai easily. For JD, however, it went further: This was how she lived with herself, her circumstances, all these years later. This truly was, and she said it no more heavily than she would a response to one of Shepard's orders.

It had been such a perplexing response that Shepard's headache had gone away, her head lifted from her palm, only to look at Mai with genuine confusion.

"Excuse me? Chief Gul?"

Mai had been intelligent. Far smarter than him, JD liked to think. It had been there first day shooting Mass Effect based weaponry on the Alliance range, and the moment they had gotten back Mai had taken to her omni, writing out notes and calculations that were done out by hand and mind alone. No calculators, no guess work, just math as she would know it. Physics and ballistics cementing themselves in her mind as if necessary.

_"What's that?"_

_"Adjustments for windage and distance with these weapons. I need to memorize them. Need to know how they work."_

She had been calculating the knowledge of how to shoot these weapons right down to theory, for her cover and for her effectiveness on the field. Though what she had to sacrifice for that had been a social understanding of why her very existence had been wrong from the start. To know that there was a certain social dynamic and understanding that she would never, truly, know as JD had, as Shepard had.

The gears in her mind spun, and JD knew what it looked like: When she was in her armor she would freeze, her form frozen before looking to the speaker again. That didn't happen this time. Not as the gears spun and spun for far too long before Mai finally answered.

"Hypothetical. Ma'am."

Shepard still had a problem with that. "Kidnapping implies she's innocent."

Those cases didn't happen as much on the Crisium City on Luna. JD's father often talked of his work to his son. Too many stories of detectives getting alienated from their families because of work had been that reason why he spoke to his son about an occupation some wouldn't. What he knew of kidnapping though, they often never ended well. Demands would never be met, either out of policy or inability, and in the end most kidnappings ended up as murders.

Though JD had to think, just for a moment, had Mai been victim to Stockholm Syndrome when they took her? He didn't think he'd find out, but still, it might've explained partly why Mai had been having such a difficult time with this conversation. The bigger part however had been plain to JD:

JD knew what he would do in that situation, but Mai did not know what she would do. Not if she could save herself from that life. She was guilty of nothing but being herself: that's why ONI had come for her.

"If they were innocent, I'd stop them." Her words had been hollow. JD knew she meant it if it had been someone else, but the way she spoke now, with pauses, with a inward look she denied herself ever since her birth, she lied to Shepard.

She knew she lied and it burned her tongue, and, for once, she felt like she needed helmet now more than anything as her face was not her own, scowling at herself.

Shepard knew lies. She'd spent every moment of her free time after Akuze speaking, and bringing, truth to power. In another life, she would've been a politician, championing truth, justice, and mercy. In this life she had a gun to do that with. She saw a lie in the air, and that became the biggest mystery about Master Chief Petty Officer Mai Gul to her. Not her armor, not her training, but who she was.

"Right…" Was all that she could say, picking herself up off the table. "Chief Gul, Chief Durante, we're on the move in about an hour. Gotta play politics for a bit. Get ready."

She disappeared down the elevator to the gear lockers, leaving Mai and JD alone as, without prompting, Mai had replaced Shepard's place on the table.

Her left hand had come up to the side of her helmet, her right hand on the table, fingertips pushing into the material, lost in thought. "Am I really that wrong?"

"Huh?"

She didn't repeat what she said, even as JD slid into the chair next to her. He knew what she said, but it was a self-awareness that seemed unkind to her. "Ain't nothing wrong about you Mai." He sat on his char cocked, facing her. "Just what been done with you, that's my problem."

Her head turned, and the uncanny valley put itself on her. She moved like a statue and the ODST had been spooked for a flash of a second. "What's been done to me, JD, that's the only reason I'm here right now. Why is that so wrong?"

He wished he could've explained. He wished he could've told her that the entire Spartan program was morally wrong, and an end that would justify those means held no meaning when it had been so reprehensible. Though to say it true, it would be to invalidate her life, and he could not do that. Not now, not here, and perhaps, not ever.

The silence was his answer.

* * *

It was easy to acclimate. Far easier than they had anticipated.

Human meant far more than two eyes, two years, ten fingers and toes. Human had meant the conduct of living a life. Human meant standing outside of a hole in the wall store and the window displays but never going in, annoying the owner inside. Human meant loudly speaking into your omni-tool and arguing in public with your significant other to everyone's chagrin. Human meant not caring at all when a woman that had been a foot and a half too tall, and about a eight hundred pounds too heavy walked through the crowd.

Sexual dimorphism, capitalism, the knowledge on how to have poor table manners, being a jerk, and social etiquette that could be understood across species, it had made the aliens of the Citadel feel human. Though that was the trick that JD and Mai, moreso Mai, had used on themselves: it wasn't a fact that these behaviors were anymore associated with being human as much as it was associated with being Asari or Turian. It was rather it was _normal._

The Turian's face mandibles, the floating nature of the Hanar, and the squatness of the Volus paired with their protective suits… all of it alien, and yet, normal.

Fears from the Admiralty and those who knew of their true nature of being overwhelmed, left in that multicultural, multiracial, multi-species pot that had been the Citadel, it was unfounded as Mai and JD walked, albeit uneasily, through the crowds of the docks. Civilian, C-Sec, and military, from all creeds of life combined into one group, and Anderson's shore team walked through it with no trouble at all.

A big enough berth was given because of Mai anyway.

The thought of Xenophobia was the excuse: the true reason why anyone worried here, with the ODST and the Spartan, was the very idea that they had been drilled with the thought that anything not human had been out to kill them. Circumstantially, it had been true, but it was systematic of a bigger reason:

All of their apprehension if there had been any, it was explained with a simple declaration: Survival.

So as Mai was scanned down with the C-Sec scanners, chest to chest with a Turian, looking up to her, nothing about this triggered any sense of hostility that hadn't been applied to everyone she met. This… man, if she was using the term correctly, was just doing his job. He was not a person whose very first instinct at the sight of a human was to kill: that was what JD and Mai were wired, were born and raised, to attend to as a sixth sense.

They were cautious, yes, but they were not worried.

They did their homework, read their books, watched their touristy travel vids.

There had been people on Earth still, in that galaxy, who had never met an Asari, or seen an Elcor, so where JD and Mai were at mindset wise, it was okay. They would be okay.

Mostly okay. "You know everything in my twenty years with C-Sec tells me to report your armor, human." The Turian officer had looked her armor up and down. "Not one bit of Eezo off of ya that isn't residual."

"Stealth tech, officer." Anderson had been by Mai's side as she was swiped up and down the scanners that led into the C-Sec concourse and out to the rest of the Citadel access. "Lessons learned from the Normandy." He thumbed back to the frigate, resting in its bay as Alliance logistics carted more supplies into it. It left on a shakedown run, not fully stocked with provisions for a longer tasking.

"Ah, right, that's that ship Palaven is so up and arms about." The C-Sec officer looked over, his darker skin making his white face paint shine. "I don't get paid enough to ask questions about these things. The mech is clear, long as she's just a VI."

Mai tilted her head and Anderson had gotten the confusion. They had thought her a mech. With one movement she had lifted her helmet off, breathing in the air of the Citadel. Her balaclava remained beneath it, leaving only the single hole that bridged across her nose and eyes to reveal that she had been of flesh. More man than machine as it looked like.

"Spirits." The C-Sec officer was aghast. "Maybe I should hop off the dextro-amino food if you humans get your sized."

Her blue eyes were blank as the helmet went back on.

"Enough struttin', Chief Gul, we get it you're tall." Shepard had teased on the other end, waiting patiently with Ashley and Kaiden. JD had appeared behind her as Mai rolled her head, adjusting the seals on her helmet, finally coming through.

It was a decision that Anderson had to go with on the spot: whether or not Mai would've been allowed on station with her armor. Then again, to be hidden in plain sight was a blessing unto itself. She had been just like the Normandy in that way, and they would proceed with it.

The all-body scanner swept JD up and down as he got done gawking at the station. "First time?"

He spread his arms. Even Luna had the same security processes. "Yeah."

The C-Sec officer passed over his guns and pistol with his omni. "Hm. Not many people carry like you anymore. Gonna have to ask you to keep them deactivated. You and the big one."

Shepard had noticed this the second they had touched down on Eden Prime: they carried their guns in the olden way. Their safeties were their trigger finger.

Here however, it made sense to not carry like that. With a flick of a switch the guns shrunk down, but they were still on their slings. Mai had carried her DMR across her chest, while JD had his SMG tucked beneath his left arm, ready to be swung out. It was a very specific choice to hold a weapon like that, and, again, Shepard wondered what kind of training those two had.

"Thanks. You're good. Like the helmet, by the way."

"Me too." JD could only respond, moving forward and joining the rest of his group. His mind had long phased out the actual helmet from his peripheral, the HUD burned into his vision, ghosts of what they were still present when his helmet had been off.

Walking up to Shepard and Anderson, they could've proceeded now, if it hadn't been for a flash of purple and pink creating itself to the image of an Asari in front of the exit processing. "Greetings!"

AI were outlawed. That was one of the easy facts to learn about this galaxy. To Mai and JD it would've been a change, no doubt. The amount of direct interactions he personally had with AI, JD could count on one hand, while Mai had herself avoided them altogether. There was a certain oddity to them, even when they were back home: the spitting image of a human mind as it was donated, at least in terms of the Smart AI. Even the Dumb AI that had often corralled most civilian ports and cities were a great deal knowledgeable in passing conversation that they could pose as human. Funny then, as it was, that when AI were given an avatar, they would imitate flesh. Funny to JD at least as the VI before them scanned them again.

"Welcome back to the Citadel. It appears that we have new guests today with you." She spoke to Anderson, having been here on the Citadel before it seemed. He had only given a faint smile to the program as it spoke from its holographic circlet on the floor

"This is Avina." He meekly offered.

Shepard had been intrigued. She was intrigued by many things in her life, and she lived by a certain mindset. _"Redefine what you think is a miracle, and miracles happen everyday." _A Mongolian horse farmer told her long ago, on a soul searching Summer. Avina had been one such miracle.

"Hello? Are you a person or a…?"

Avina's holographic features smiled in what expressiveness it had, its body rigid in its data stream like composition.

"My name is Avina, and I am pleased to be your virtual guide throughout the Citadel. To answer your question, I am a fully interactive virtual intelligence programmed to provide spontaneous guidance at predetermined locations of interested throughout the station."

Shepard herself hadn't much interaction with VIs, or at least, if she had she had blotted them out as purely tools to her. For all her briefing in N7 training about the Geth and the AI rebellion of the Quarians, she had understood that warning well. Any number of horror movies about rogue AIs on the spaceships had caused her a few sleepless nights.

Shepard had only smiled at the VI with a nod, the avatar not doing anything back as she looked to the Captain. "You lead the way sir."

Avina shut off, and the group followed. The group that had been there was purposeful: only those that had been in Shepard's fireteam on the ground in Eden Prime. It was a large group, but no doubt they needed to be on hand for Udina and the Council.

That was why they were summoned personally.

Shepard had to answer for her failures, and she could barely hide her anxiousness in her low brow. The pressure of galactic politics had drooped her shoulders in her armor a bit, only reminding JD and Mai that they were, in a sense, lucky.

Politics didn't matter with the Covenant. Only lead. Tons of lead.

Just because they had been somewhat acclimated didn't meant they saw a threat where no one else did. Not when the doors out of C-Sec dock processing had opened and, at the other end, more C-Sec officers had been waiting with a Turian that had been the scariest example yet. One that made Mai tighten her jaw and JD suck in a breath.

His skin had been greyer than Nihlus, and his facial markings far more imposing, as if tracing his skull. Tilted down, his eyes stared up at them in a glower that had caused the two to seize as he stuck out his hand very suddenly at Anderson. The captain returned it thankfully. "I'm Executor Pallin. My men will escort you to the embassy."

"Of course, Executor." The group of C-Sec officers that surrounded them had Mai in a mental frenzy. If it had just been Turians, she would've known how to level that threat. But it hadn't just been Turians. Humans were there too. Unsurprisingly all of them drew their eyes onto her. No one in the galaxy had seen something like her.

Executor Palin's mandibles twitched for a moment, his sunken eyes looking to Mai before he lead the way. She could only stare back.

To the uninitiated she emanated of horror.

Turian mythology and religion focused on the idea of Spirits. They were the sum of the whole in the regimented, Turian society. A military unit's spirit was the collective embodiment of its courageousness and lethality. A city's spirit was of its successes and its failures in industry and history. The spirit of the land would be of its scars and hills, its crops and its basins.

Mai however, written in the back of the minds of every Turian who saw her, stared up at her, saw the Spirit of Palaven's past. Titans, according to the creation myths of Palaven, once walked their homeworld. They were worshipped as gods by the Turians, how one swipe of their hand entire cities could be wiped out. As was their terrible justice.

The Spirit of the Titan resided in Mai. She did not look human. She did not stand like a human. She stood like an old god, come back to this world to exact vengeance for her dead race.

Palin looked away from Mai quickly, hoping no one would notice his wide eyes, coughing once in his hand.

"If you shall follow me."

Like a giant concourse. JD had felt pangs of his home on Luna in the way the Citadel looked. When those doors opened, the flashes of cameras from drones had drowned them all.

_"Commander Shepard! Commander Shepard! Do you have any comment on the situation at Eden Prime?!"_

_"Shepard! Is it true you were present on a ship that was at Eden Prime?!"_

_"Commander Shepard! Alliance Command still hasn't verified whether or not the murder of thirteen alleged Cerberus Personnel-"_

_Huh? _Mai had been to taken by the flashes, resembling gunfire, to even notice the questions asked of Shepard as news media from five different races crowded them all. But JD heard, kept in his back pocket to search about later.

Mai simply averted her eyes from the crowd, as much as her training betrayed her. The harsh lights of camera flashes had been unkind to her as she kept them focused on the bottom left of her HUD, following JD's blip.

Anderson had forgotten what kind of draw Shepard had. She was a celebrity, a hero. The Extranet loved it when a hero fell.

She was a media darling, knowing what to say, and putting on the right face for the Alliance abroad. Her name was even heroic: Shepard.

She knew the loops as Palin's men pushed out, forcing the crowd of reporters out. "Please direct all questions to the Media and Public Relations Office of the Systems Alliance! I'm not taking any questions today!" It was Shepard that said that, with a voice too used to saying that for the last year. She had her controversies and reporters loved to dig.

If this was another universe, Mai would've been, then and there under the barrage of cameras, the most photographed Spartan of humanity. It was impressive then that, despite being herself, all eyes had still been on Shepard.

"Move it people! You'll get your story!" Palin barked out at the ravenous crowd.

"We don't have a car?" Anderson asked him.

He shook his head annoyed, just shy of swatting a rushing reporter. "None that can fit that… thing." He said as an asides to him, thumbing to Mai. She heard it though.

"Christ, what the hell are you working for these guys for?" Ashley reminded JD and Mai of a UNSC Marine. A lot actually. Perhaps it was in the way she spoke, her language and familiarity with knowing what it meant to be a Marine with her boots on the ground, but the looking glass for them cracked for a moment as Ashley spoke to one of the escorting, C-Sec guards. He was a human.

"Pays well enough. Keeps me close to my family."

"No- I mean, C-Sec is mostly Turians I hear. Don't you think-"

The man chuckled, looking away from Ashley. "Not gonna talk about this."

It felt wrong for JD to simply be walking like, this, gun not out and helping out with the perimeter. The crowd thinned out however, not wanting to follow through the narrower sections of the path they were on and put themselves at risk a the shoving of a C-Sec officer, however that peace gave JD something to think about as he looked passed and saw another life. It reminded him very much of Luna and Crisium City.

It was a city, yes, but it felt as if they were indoors. The steel that surrounded them all as if it had replaced an earthen nature was claustrophobic, and each inch of space was used in some manner that betrayed what this place was:

The Protheans made this place. The very idea of them as alien as anything to JD and Mai. Mankind had made it to space on their own, however, every species here it seemed piggybacked on the shoulders of giants, long gone.

The group passed a young Asari child, standing with her hand wrapped in the talons of her Turian father, looking into the glass of a hole-in-the-wall ship model store, a Salarian attending to another customer. How human it looked: a child wanting a new toy as their parents entertained them with "maybe next time". How human it seemed, contrasted to where they were: on hallowed grounded maybe.

In all of the wonders of the Galaxy, they had turned an ancient installation made by an ancient alien species far more advance than them, into the City of God. Made in their image.

It was odd, JD thought, walking among the Citadel and its buildings, it stores and shops and residences. Sometimes, when he looked up and saw only the inverted city scape of the other arms of the Citadel, he did not see the stars.

He had become very sensitive to Mai's silence, then and there. He wanted to ask her what he thought, but didn't, shying away. It wasn't the time or place. But if he did ask, he would've gotten no answer. For in that urban sprawl of neon lights and a consumerist society that had laid itself like a shaved cat on that ancient station, she remembered New Jerusalem.

* * *

"You know something! Audio logs recovered from our ground team and Nihlus note that Saren Arterius was present. You know something that we don't!"

Turian Councilor Sparatus did the equivalent of flaring his nostrils. "Do you think we would be as bombastic to send two Spectres to secure a Prothean Beacon? We did not send Saren to Eden Prime, Ambassador. He's too good to babysit."

"Then why was he _there_?"

"That is unconfirmed and you know that."

That was what the present crew of the Normand walked into.

"Two Spectres would've then done us good though! Especially since Nihlus ended up the way he did."

"Hold your tongue Ambassador." Sparatus ground through his jaws. "This little fetch mission cost him everything."

"I will not!" Udina pointed a finger at his hologram. "This is an outrage! The Council would step in if the Geth attacked a Turian colony!"

Salarian Councilor Valern had sighed, rather audibly. "The Turians don't found colonies on the borders of the Terminus Systems, Ambassador."

His compatriot, Asari Councilor Tevos agreed, folding her arms in front of her red dress. "Humanity was well aware of the risks when you went into the Traverse."

Udina hadn't noticed the crew entering, but that's why he had been good at his job, focusing on the politics in front of him. If this was another life he would've echoed something to them: that human expansionism was curbed due to Citadel sanctioning on frontier worlds and colonization. In that life however, Mai Gul had given up the locations of colonizable planets within Systems Alliance space, and more were on the way if she was treated right. If she trusted them, in the end.

"We demand the truth! You sent one of your own and another one of Humanity's Spectre candidates into a botched mission! If Saren was there this would be the second time it's happened!"

Sparatus scoffed. "You don't get to make demands of the Council, Ambassador." His hands held behind his back like the military man that he was.

"Citadel Security is investigating your claims about interference and the mission at Eden Prime. We will discussed C-Sec findings at the hearings. Not before."

The line was cut, and the humans were left alone as Udina released his hot breath and turned to greet the reasons why he had been losing more and more of his grey hair: He was going to berate them, but he stopped cold.

This was the first time he had seen the two humans of the UNSC first hand. They had caused him enough of a headache in the month prior, but annoyance wouldn't be what he would tell them, tell Mai, now that she was in front of them. She was a giant, matching even a Krogan Battlemaster in presence, looking down on all as if waiting to render judgement.

In case a diplomatic incident regarding them were had, either through some streak of xenophobia or some massacre, he was briefed on what was the plan: Project Spartan being an experimental trial of combat drug implementation and next gen armor system which caused side effects in the user that could've conveniently been anything. JD had been her handler, and Mai had been the test rat.

"I'm uh- glad to see the tests are going well Chief Gul, Chief Durante."

They both had said nothing, answering only in a nod.

Anderson had gestured his finger to Shepard and the rest of her men, and they had left his side as Shepard led them to the balcony.

The Presidium had been far more beautiful than anything the UNSC could've made on an floating space station. It was like the most idyllic park, and, for a moment, JD had considered taking off his helmet as the fireteam collectively leaned on the balcony.

"Helluva a view." Kaiden peered over, seeing the walkways for others below the embassies. "Think people take a swim out there?"

The lakes were a light blue, and, oddly enough, a Krogan statue had stood before one of the pond sitting areas.

Kaiden nudged Shepard's elbow. She shook her head. "I wonder if there are fish in there."

"Probably not." JD hadn't known why he had blurt that out. The fireteam looked at him, hoping he'd explain. He pulled an answer out his ass as Shepard tilted her head at him. "Uh. Gravitational differences aren't good for fishes that originate on Earth."

_Yeah that sounded right._

"Huh."

"Captain Anderson. I see you brought half your crew." Udina sterned Anderson as said crew looked over as if to give the Ambassador a wave. Shepard made herself available however, pushing off the railing to join her captain.

"Only Shepard's ground team. The fireteams that were in the colony are unrelated."

"I'm sure Ryder will answer different, Captain."

Anderson rolled his eyes as Hitman's ownership by the other N7 was known even to Udina.

"Well, I brought them here. They would know how to answer any of the important questions if you have them."

Udina chopped his hand into his own palm. "I have the mission reports. I assume they're accurate?"

Shepard folded her hands behind her back, almost in emulation of what she saw from Sparatus briefly.

"They are. And based on your chat there, it seems like the Council will give us the floor for this."

"They aren't happy about it," Udina shook his head. "They lost one of their top agents, and the mission was supposed to be easy, Commander."

Shepard's face crinkled. "Circumstances were out of my control, Ambassador. There are things that even we still don't know. Like the apparent presence of another Spectre."

"Saren Arterius." Udina spoke calmly. "The only reason we're making the claim that he was also there is because you claim Nihlus said his name."

"Yes sir," Shepard responded with all her heart. "Perhaps Saren was also observing me."

"He would." Anderson admitted. "He's not… fond of the idea of a Human Spectre."

There was an uncomfortableness in his throat saying that. "But the fact that Saren didn't step in, or do anything to assist you while the Geth, _the Geth of all things, _laid waste to our colony… It's almost as if the Council wanted to see Eden Prime burn."

Shepard's hands balled into fist behind her back. "I won't be made a scapegoat, Ambassador. Good people died on Eden Prime and I will hold people responsible."

Her voice was like glass. When it broke, people knew, grinding against the floor as if a dare.

"Settle down, Commander. You've done more than enough to jeopardize your candidacy for the Spectres." Udina kept glancing at the door, as if there was a threat. But there wouldn't be any, C-Sec had guards posted out the front door.

"You seemed occupied, Ambassador?" Shepard noticed.

"Just pressed for time. Given everything," he admitted. "The mission to Eden Prime was supposed to be your chance you could perform even the simplest duties of the Spctres, for the Council. Instead Nihlus ends up in a coma, and the beacon was destroyed!"

"That's not her fault! The Geth attacked!" Anderson defended his crew. He wasn't worth a damn as an officer if he didn't, especially against a politician like Udina.

"I know, Captain, I know." Despite being a politician, Udina was still human. "But we better hope C-Sec turns up evidence to defend us. Otherwise we might lose our best chance at earning our place in the galaxy."

The Ambassador looked at his omni-tool, checking the time. Of really, all the times for this to happen today was not good. Not with who was in the room at that very moment. "Captain Anderson, I need you to go to the Tower with your team and wait for me."

Anderson seemed surprised. "Don't you want to go over a few things?"

Udina had, in the span of seconds, seemed frantic. "I do, but-" He looked to Mai and JD, lazily looking out and admiring the scenery. "You need to leave, right now. I have other arrangements."

On cue, and it would've killed them all. The doors to Udina's office had opened swiftly, and in came walking those who were supposed to be there at that minute. It was scheduled after all.

Ashley and Kaiden had been the first to turn around, and for that, Kaiden's face drained of color as Williams, none the wiser, poked JD's shoulder and coaxed him to look at who entered the room. It was when Mai heard the tell-tale sound of a hoof walk on metal, did she snap.

It had occurred to JD and Mai that they had never seen what any of the Covenant looked like out of combat. No one but perhaps ONI knew what a Sangheili looked like when they were back home, living a life without the Covenant. Nor did they know what the Unggoy proceeded on their own homeworld, where they didn't need their methane suits and harnesses. The Covenant had always been viewed through the film of war, and now, for the first time in their lives, the two soldiers who had been to war with the Covenant only knew how to act through that film.

It explained why Mai had snapped into a combat form, ghosting over her hip and pistol as JD jerked his arm up to crane his gun to aim.

Vice versa, it explained why the Shipmistress Seylu Karonee had fluttered her cape one way as she went to unhook her sword from its clasp and, over her shoulder, the Jiralhanae, the Brute known as Mercaius, grasp his gravity hammer and turn it on.

It was an arm barred, on both sides, that left all those who would respond and start combat at the very knowledge of each other's existence crooked and frozen as if in a picture. Half-way forms and moves.

For JD and Mai, it had been Anderson, stepping in front of both of them with a nimbleness that had made Shepard second guess herself about the man's age.

For the other new entrants to their galaxy, it was an arm that came from a being held in a hover chair: The Prophet of Destiny.

Mai had never seen one this close: a Prophet; the San'Shyuum. She had only killed them from a distance with a sniper rifle, or with preplaced explosives. That was the level of security each one of them commanded. How painful then, it was that the closest she'd been to one had been here, and now. Secrets were spilled to the floor and yet still hidden by plain sight.

The Covenant did not want anyone to know that they had been to war with a humanity. The Alliance knew that, but kept their knowledge of it a secret given the Covenant's current pacification toward them. On top of that the very fact Mai and JD had been alive, in Alliance hands, was not supposed to be a secret, they were just normal humans after all. It was a secret that the Covenant, for their own sake, also had to feed into. To the galaxy, they had no idea why the woman in her hulking armor, her face like that of a black hole, and the similarly black-clad shock trooper evoked such responses from the Sangheili and the Jiralhanae.

It was the Unggoy that had been with them that broke whatever freeze they were in and screamed back out into the hall.

Orders were orders. JD wanted to scream inside of his helmet, but did nothing as he immediately dropped the grip he had on his gun and let it fall on his chest by sling, finding the gaze of Shepard as her head was on a swivel: between them and the Covenant.

He cleared his throat. "Didn't recognize them, is all." He said fast. He wasn't used to telling lies and his voice broke in telling them. Mai offered no such fabrications as she stepped down, a very audible breath from her mouth coming out as if she was a bull, biding her time.

"Oh, my Elites, I had thought that we had gotten over this?" Came the croaky, old voice of a Prophet, translated through their Omni-tools. His gravity chair moved for him, barely tilting as he moved his arm and lowered it peacefully, only to return his sight to the two humans he knew, he recognized.

Mai was well predisposed with what the San'Shyuum looked like, briefed on the species during a dozen different deep ops behind Covenant lines. They were the targets Spartan-IIIs like her were supposed to sacrifice themselves to take out. For JD however, it was different, and he was thankful he had his helmet on, hiding his face that was aghast with disbelief. The Elite and Brute he could handle. He didn't lie to himself, humanity would never commit a genocide like the one he felt was needed… right?

In any case, he fully anticipated this day to come: the day he would have to come face to face with his former enemies.

He didn't anticipate these rumored Prophets, however, to look so human. Their faces at least. Immediately he knew the character he could've given the Prophet of Destiny, now face to face, not behind a news broadcast.

This was what a leader of the Covenant looked like, and it looked like an elder he himself would respect.

Every single piece of his being wanted to raise his gun, to open fire. But he stayed. He had a new life now, and if anyone needed to fight against urges now, it wouldn't be him.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw it. The way Mai's right hand hovered over her pistol, minute vibrations, jerks. She fought against gravity itself at that moment. It wasn't her fighting her body: it was her fighting her soul; her very nature.

He did the only thing he knew how to do:

He reached out as Shepard, an eyebrow raised over her concerned gaze at the two of them, stepped in front of them, returning her face to the delegation they were rudely in the way of.

On both of their heads, their motion trackers remaining on, the room lit up red as, slowly, just as they were doing, the Covenant stood down.

A mile divide separated both parties in the room, cut between those who knew and those who didn't; those who had an idea, and those who weren't supposed to.

Kill or be killed had turned into diplomacy, and the soldiers of the war, on both sides, had to deal with it.

For Mai and JD, they had been standing across from the enemy that had wanted them dead for being human, and had done everything in their power to make that so.

For Karonee and Mercaius, before them stood a Demon.

"I'm sorry, we'll be out of your way." Shepard bowed her head down respectfully to the group. She didn't know any better. Motioning to a grim looking Kaiden and a somewhat perplexed Ashley, they walked to her.

"Nonsense. If it's anyone, it'd be us intruding on you, generally." Destiny moved his grav chair forward, but Karonee had gripped her hands upon it. She could not say her warning, but could press it onto him. He ignored it.

Shepard heard JD step toward her, but she stepped forward in turn.

Half way, that's how the Prophet of Destiny and Jane Shepard met.

The commander had been wondering when she would've crossed paths with the Covenant. She had been in the Alaskan bush hunting deer when Altis had happened, surprised that the Admiralty hadn't called her and the rest of the N7s back to be briefed. Though she understood now why: Ryder had been the N7 in charge of that situation, and so her mind was settled. In the end, the Covenant had been edgy, if not peaceful. Peaceful enough to have been brought to the Citadel to start their own diplomatic proceedings on being recognized by the Galaxy.

Shepard's face had been a smile as the two converged, Destiny sharing the same as he reached one of his hands. His eyes had been like a Salarian, she noted, his skin giving off the impression that he had been an elder of sort based on the wrinkles, his elongated head cocked down to see Shepard, eye to eye.

She reached back, shaking. The human activity of a hand shake had been something he was to practice now. Indeed all those in the Covenant would have to do that. "The Prophet of Destiny, I presume?"

"Yes, and who do I have the pleasure of meeting here now?"

"I'm Lieutenant Commander Shepard of the SSV Normandy, I was just on my way out with my team." The respectfulness in her voice, it was admirable. Destiny had met many recently who had that kind of respect in their tones, but here, in this unexpected meeting, she did it without warning, naturally.

"Lieutenant Commander Shepard. I will remember that name." He very much would if she had walked in step with a Demon. "I presume you could guess as to why we are here?"

"Ah, not everyday several million individuals get marooned in Alliance space. I presume you're here to make your own place?"

She spoke candidly, easily. "Naturally. We'd hate to be a burden to humanity."

He spoke in truths and in lies. Lies that made Mai and JD grind their teeth and twitch their eyes.

Karonee had been glancing back and forth between the Prophet and the Demons and her Imp, Mercaius still standing, his fingers digging themselves into the leather grip of his Gravity Hammer. One swing, one impact of it would destroy that entire office.

More Elites came into the room. Not armored, but ready to throw down. At least five that hadn't been the smaller ones besides the Prophet. The Grunts already fled the scene as several Jackals came in by the sides of those Elites. The large Brute seemed ready to swing as, one by one, they all came in, and a sampler of an Empire was displayed.

Mai had never seen every member of the Covenant in one room. JD hadn't recognized the Engineers or the Prophets at all.

The only one that was armed and armored as they were in the field had been the Hunter. The only thing missing from it had been its fuel rod gun. It was a miracle that one had been able to fit in, but the accommodation of the Elcor had made it possible as it groaned and growled like a Earth tiger.

"At ease." The words from the smaller Sangheili had been translated through the Omni, and for the first time in their lives JD and Mai had heard what an Elite sounded like in English. More than that, they had also known now what a female Elite looked like.

Seylu Karonee bobbed her head back and forth across those behind her, telling them as best she could without uttering a word, dropping the veil of ignorance, to not do anything.

JD and Mai were the ones with the guns. They could've taken them, perhaps, if the Brute didn't throw his hammer and knock them off the floor. They could've taken them if the Hunter didn't charge at them. They could've taken them if-

"I think it'd be best, Lieutenant Commander, if you'd go to the Tower and wait. I'll be holding Chief Gul and Chief Durante for a moment." Anderson's voice transformed, sliding into one of heaviness, weariness. This wasn't how they wanted to tackle this topic, but this was the hand they were drawn. At least this time, instead of Geth, it had just been bad timing.

Karonee brooded as she had motioned back to clear the doorway.

"Seem like the spooks are in trouble." Ashley teased. But Shepard saw more to it.

"Sir?"

"Go Shepard. **Now**." Orders.

She looked back to Destiny. "It was a pleasure making the introduction." He said slowly, lowly.

Shepard could only return it. "I hope to meet again one day." She looked back to her men. "Come on."

The second the door closed to Udina's office no one would know what would happen. Bets were made, hopes and fear laid out to the floor, and, for the first time in her life, Mai Gul hesitated to kill the Covenant.

* * *

Usze Tahamee had seen the irony of where he had been right now. It took him the long way around, between dodging assassins in his culture and slaughtering on the battlefields of mankind, but he had eventually ended up as guard duty for a Prophet. The situation was, of course, exceptional, and the need for it was readily available to any with a modicum of respect for that situation, but still it was ironic. Still, being part of the Honor Guard didn't meant he'd be doing what he was doing now.

"Listen here you Bosh'tet!" A long finger from a three-fingered hand touched his claret combat harness, ignoring the fact he had been cradling a Carbine in his arms. "I don't like humans anymore than the next person, but I need to see them! I have information that they need to hear and no one else will listen!"

She was whiny, barely half his height, probably five times less his weight, and yet she was persistent.

Usze looked over to the Elite on the other side of the stairs leading up to the . He was just as dismissive as him, guarding the way up to the Human, Elcor, and Volus embassies. He also wasn't helping.

"_Again," _It was odd to speak with such reservation. To a civilian no less. "For the safety of our Hierarch, we cannot allow you to proceed. Step away."

The Asari at the front desk had hardly seemed bothered by the "suit rat" as Usze had heard her called by a passerby beneath his breath.

She grumbled audibly behind her mask, her eyes luminescent, the very faint shadow of her nose crinkling behind it noting her aggravation. "I can't even wait! They're following me! Would you rather me die, right here? In front of you?"

Usze bobbed his head non-chalantly, looking out at the sparse foot traffic of the presidium. In another life, if this was a human station, this would've been a prime hunting ground. So lackadaisical, how ignorant everyone there walked. There had been nothing for them to be ignorant about however, there was no war here. If the Citadel had been anything like High Charity, there was no reason for this one to be afraid. Security seemed tight by all means that even his posting with Destiny was purely posturing.

"I'd rather not you die, given our… relations, but I will not move from this spot until my Hierarch wills."

"Just because we share a homeworld means nothing to me, Sangheili." It was refreshing that just because the ancient homeworld of the Quarians had also turned out to be Sangheilios, it didn't mean that the Quarians had been so weak spined as a whole to immediately open arms to the Sangheili. Most did according to the reports on how Quarians throughout the Galaxy on their pilgrimage were making for Altis in order to assist the Covenant, but a precious few had made known over the extranet that the Admiralty had been desperate to accept such a highly volatile coincidence dictate relations with a new conglomerate of aliens.

He could respect this Quarian for that, even if she did it in the way a petulant child does.

"Then we are agreed." Usze had said back. He hadn't exactly been accommodating of the Quarians who had landed on Altis and were given guest of Destiny himself. He knew of the tactical and practical ramifications: if the Quarians had been so willing to host some of their people and assist them in a common goal, and that is the liberation of Rannoch in some distant future, they would ferry Covenant species in their nomadic lifestyle, allowing them a way to spread out into the universe outside of the Alliance. Surely, knowing Sanghelios' fate in that galaxy had given Usze a pang in his heart, but this hadn't been his galaxy. Would he go to war for the Quarians? Of course not. But ends justified means, and Destiny saw it that way. He was no longer just a Sangheili who existed for the Sangheili. He was part of the Covenant, and the Covenant came first.

Otherwise the answer might've been different.

"Please." Two balled fists had hit his chest, but there were nothing but a tap to him. He did nothing, she wasn't a threat as she begged, a croak in her voice. "My friend has already died for this, and if I just let this message loose I'll be called a conspiracy nut. I have to tell someone who can get it up to the right people."

He didn't have his helmet on, his harness was enough and Destiny had made it very clear that he wanted the Galaxy to see them all as they were: not covered in the shroud of war. That only meant he had been vulnerable; vulnerable in the sense that the Qurian had been able to lock eyes with him.

Usze didn't remember the last time he'd been lied to, if, at all. Lies and sedition, conspiracy, they were not part of Sangheili culture, or of the Covenant. So he was intimate with the truth, enough that it felt like Quarian had held it within her and believed herself.

The scar on his face, left by a Demon, burned.

"Hey! You there! C-Sec get down on the ground!" A Turian voice cried out in what looked like a pair of C-Sec officers.

"Keelah!" And the Quarian was gone without another word, dashing away from Usze as she jumped over the balcony, out of view, in fear of her life.

The Turian that had called out her name had approached Usze. "Why didn't you stop her?!"

He looked… worn, ragged. Not clean. The smell of him spoke to it. "I cannot move. I have my duties." Holding his Carbine tighter against his chest the Turian only swore a word that the translator couldn't translate cleanly and ran off with his partner, obviously in chase.

The Asari at the front desk didn't seem bothered as the other Elite on guard shrugged. "This galaxy is strange, brother." He spoke.

Usze loosened his shoulders in response. "So it is."

"Very interesting it is, though, you didn't stop her." A human voice had come from behind, and Usze snapped around to see an armored human walk down the stairs. In truth Usze did hear a screaming Grunt a few moments before but thought nothing of it. The little gremlins were often that skittish.

What he saw had been a very casual human, walking down the stairs with two in tow, a man and a woman.

"Who was that?"

"It is no concern of yours human." He saw her, and recognized her as a warfighter. Not like a Demon. More like the usual UNSC welp. Her red hair had been tied into a bun in the back, and her freckles intrigued him, honestly. He had never been given to see a human face alive and clean like that.

"She just seems like trouble. Is all. I caught a bit of that conversation of yours and it seemed interesting."

"Indeed it was." Usze wanted to block, but Shepard knew the way around.

"The Prophet of Destiny, he seemed especially interested in cooperating with humanity… Every great journey begins with a single step, don't it? Why not here? So what was her name?"

He relented. If this human was as important enough to have come from behind him he figured she wanted to know for a good reason.

She did tell him her name when she first approached. "Her name was… Tali? _**Tali'Zorah**_ I think." He couldn't remember the last part. Ke had been one of the Elites on that station right now with him, accompanying a similar Quarian entourage. He had been part of the Covenant task group in charge with liaison efforts when he hadn't been tasked with Usze. The older Elite took it well enough, as much as he had felt guilted about forcing Admiral Shala'Raan into a flu. She was well, though. She would survive, and that meant the world to the Quarians.

Shepard nodded her head. "I see… Sangheili right?"

She drew the conversation back to him. "Hm?"

"Sangheili. Am I saying your species name correctly?"

"Ah." Usze understood. Humans were far more curious than he had ever anticipated. In truth many aliens were about them. The Salarian doctor, Mordin Solus, had been on the agenda of every command meeting back on the Solace given his requests for study of them. Most of them had been denied, but the good professor took it in stride. "Yes, human." He answered back.

He didn't hate humanity, but tolerating them now had been… a challenge.

"I heard chatter, over the Extranet, that your people are also called Elites? Which do you prefer?"

His eyes narrowed. "Why do you ask?"

"I'm just wondering what you'd prefer. Honestly."

He was an Ascetic. The old teachings of the Sangheili resided beneath him and he respected that very much. "Sangheili. In truth. But most of my people prefer Elites."

Even his old commander, Rtas Vadumee preferred it now, and how it struck fear in the humans. Usze wasn't quite sure how he felt about that, for in this galaxy there was no fear of them. Not if this woman was almost chest to chest with him, taking in his details as if he were-

He was alien.

To her at least.

"Thank you." There was an awkward silence that past as Usze looked away, out into the Presidium. One that Shepard had done well to avoid. "I should go. Thank you telling me."

Usze offered no response as the trio walked off into the crowds of the Presidium. If, perhaps, High Charity had been as softly, brightly lit as this place was, he might've joined the Honor Guard willingly. To his side the Elite chortled.

"Is there something about you that makes you so appealing to talk to, Major?"

He looked back to the Embassies and prayed that Destiny and Karonee would swiftly proceed with the human ambassador. "I don't wish to find out, Minor."

* * *

Shepard and the rest had left, leaving behind a bloodbath in the making.

"I want to kill you right now."

"_Demon_, I already know where my blade shall enter your body."

It was the first time Mai had ever spoken to the Covenant, and of all the words she could've used, those felt best, responded to by the Shipmistress Karonee.

How odd it had been, that the translation software of this galaxy created a line of basic understanding that could've only been matched by thirty years of war. The Elites and the Spartans had a common language, and it was that of violence.

"We had our suspicions, but… They were unconfirmed. It would've been useless to assume that the Systems Alliance harbors our very enemy." Destiny had mediated as Anderson and Udina held in their breath. Right here, right now. Fine.

Anderson had sucked in his grievances. It didn't feel good to be bouncing between issues like a pinball, but this was how it was dealt.

"We know you were at war with the UNSC. With another humanity."

"Then we are initiated."

The C-Sec Office was next door, but even then that didn't seem close enough for Anderson and Udina as Mai stepped forward, JD squaring his feet. Courses of action went through both of their heads, and, as it turns out, only communicated through that fashion. As was the benefits of having a private comm link.

"I'll fight, you go out the balcony with them."

Like hell he was. The ODST stepped in front of Anderson and Udina, coming ahead of Mai even.

Karonee had seen the move, doing the same with Destiny as the hilt of her energy sword was in her hand and out.

His speech did not change as he spoke with threat, with ominousness. "Then do you know why, then, we purged the humanity we knew?"

_ **"Your destruction is the will of the gods, and we are their instrument."** _

Words repeated. Not by the Covenant, but by Anderson.

Only then did Mai and JD realize they were caught in between Udina and Anderson, and the Covenant.

"They are our holy scourge. We are anointed by God to rid them from this world." Destiny spoke their manifest destiny.

Mai had unhooked a pistol in her right hand, one of her blades in her left.

"Your world. **Not ours**." Anderson's words battled with Destiny.

JD moved slightly over to the right as Mai saw, she echoing, moving reverse. They wouldn't get caught in the same burst of fire as Karonee sent several Elites to either side, Mercaius moving forward. He had waited years to fight a Demon.

_ **"Enough of this!"** _

"These two humans are all we ask. For them to be purged. If they are not, no peace shall exist for us, for you harbor an enemy of the Covenant. Your harbor a Demon and an Imp."

JD hadn't even known that the Covenant had a name for them. Imps. He felt blessed only after he felt the fear as sweat pooled into the absorption cushion at his forehead, pressed by his helmet.

"These two are guilty of nothing but fighting a war for their very survival, and you know that." Udina had gotten the closest a human had ever gotten to a Prophet; only to speak truth. "What would you have done, if you were in their shoes? If you were fighting a losing war?"

No answer could be given by Destiny as he frowned and remembered where the Covenant was right now: on Altis, the eyes of the galaxy; the guns of the galaxy, all aimed at them.

Udina turned away, back to Anderson's side. "We are not your humanity, and you are not in the position to barter for the lives of this man, and this woman."

"Guns down, Chiefs, helmets off."

Mai turned her head slightly to speak to Anderson, to warn him. "Sir-"

"That's an order Chief Gul!"

Spartans followed orders and she broke with them, pistol and knife falling to the ground as her training, her programing, betrayed her. Shakily her hands went to her helmet as the pressurization around it released.

Demons, after they were killed and were unable to set off their explosive fail safes, often had their helmets collected for trophies. The Covenant knew that they were nothing but human. But to see one alive, her face twisted between regret and anger and fury, but alive, it was what Anderson wanted.

Her blue eyes burned a hole through the Covenant, for that was all she could do as her helmet dropped to the floor with a metal thud and she was told, ordered, to remind the Covenant that she had been Human. Not a Demon, not a Spartan, but a Human.

It was JD that did nothing as his head snapped between Mai, between the Covenant, and between Anderson, finally locking eyes with him. In one nod, Anderson wanted him to do so as well.

Slowly, uneasily, his helmet came off and the survivor of the Covenant, of countless ships and drops and battles and worlds, bared his face to those that did the deed.

Standing there, before Destiny, before the Shipmistress Karonee, before the entire Covenant, they were monuments to all their sins, spoken through what had been done to Mai, to JD.

They were used by the Alliance to broker for peace, held up, woe was them.

"Please." Words croaked out of JD and for the first time in years, even for all his rest, his ability to sleep anywhere and anywhen, he realized how tired he was. He was tired of feeling threatened by the very beings less than ten feet away from him. "_Please."_

It was all he said, and the Elites that had come into the room all looked at each other.

"Stand and fight." Karonee bit at him. "**Fight!**"

So many names had only been remembered by him. Who would remember his? "You'd have to kill me."

An energy sword popped, and throughout the room, like a wave, the Elites followed in suit.

Destiny ignored this all as he stared directly at Udina and Anderson. "You would not give them up?"

Anderson shook his head in defiance. "Is the life of two people, worth your Covenant?"

A few seconds. A minute. An hour. A foot. A mile. The distance between stars themselves. The divide between them was that long, that wide as they stared and held.

Udina stepped between the two of them. "If these two are vermin, are worthless to you, then you can discard them. They mean nothing to you."

Karonee had thought yes. It was their duty to kill the heretics. But Destiny, he thought differently with Udina's words. "What are you doing to them?"

"Converting them. To us. To make them live as we do."

"And if they don't?"

"They would not be fit for us. To live in this galaxy." The cruelty of their situation was not lost on Mai and JD. They were denied their lives.

"Ah, interesting. So even here, you are the other." Destiny spoke to JD and Mai directly and they were pitied. "If you do not abide by them, you are dead to them. It seems we share something now."

"We're not like you." Mai grinded her teeth.

"Good." Destiny's hand reached out to Karonee's own, powering down her sword. "See to it that these two are changed, and we shall have no problem… Ambassador Udina, shall we proceed?"

"Your holiness…?" Karonee seemed surprised with the rest of the Elites.

"Weapons down. They are not the reason we are here. Isn't that right Ambassador?"

"Of course."

Mai and JD seemed just as shocked at Destiny's complacency, going on his merry way as his gravity chair passed by them and approached Udina. Without thinking the entourage passed by Mai and JD, bumping shoulders, not even regarding them save as obstacles.

The Brute Mercaius has been the last in line, given opportunity to look down upon the Demon. She averted her gaze, met only with the Brute's blue armor. "Hmph. Nothing but a woman."

And just like that, the Human-Covenant War was over for them. No death. No treaties. No conclusion. Just a man and a woman, left behind as the Galaxy continued without them.

* * *

The Covenant had been there in Udina's office to discuss the travel rights of their people among other things, as well as photo ops with the other embassies along with official relations being opened up. Altis would be where the Covenant resided for the meanwhile, but the stars would not be denied to them. Not with the Quarians offering to host any that went off-world. A complicated discussion surely, but not one for Mai or JD as they were left alone in Udina's office as the meeting took place in another chamber.

Anderson had said nothing to them but to hold position until advised otherwise, going to the Council Chambers to Shepard's hearing. It was alright though, they needed to be alone, to recollect themselves as they gathered their weapons and helmets and put them back on, returning to the balcony.

They were the other. That's what Destiny said.

They were not normal, even compared to the Covenant. Lepers in the flesh, different from the humanity that took them in at their very core. Worst of all they recognized it, used their nature for peace. In honesty, JD felt betrayed, but for Mai, it wasn't anything she hadn't known. She knew what it was like to be used as an asset of opportunity.

JD's helmet had come off almost as soon as it had come on, a cigarette between his lips as he and Mai stood side by side.

"They don't understand." The Spartan said to the ODST.

"I know."

"They're using their ignorance."

"I know."

"The Covenant will attack, I just- they have to."

They have to. Because that's what the Covenant did, right?

This galaxy was not black and white. There was no us vs them. Just shades of grey not so easily defined by the red and greens of their motion trackers.

"If I see any of them outside of this place. I'll kill them. I have to."

Because that's what Spartans did: kill Covenant.

But…

"They'll lock you up for it Mai. They'll kill you."

"_**I have to**_."

She didn't know how else to live. JD knew that so painfully. He promised her, back on Earth, that he'd help her show her the way, but what could he say? For the last near decade of his life all he had done was kill Covenant, and lose to them. He was not any different, in the end, then and there in a galaxy not their own.

"I can't let you do that, Mai."

"You don't even trust me." There was scorn on her voice as the metal railing of the balcony bent underneath her fingers.

"Wha-?"

"Back on the Normandy, when you grabbed my wrist."

JD let the cigarette sit on his lips far too long as he froze, blowing out a sour cloud as he backed off. "I just worried."

"You shouldn't have." Her voice was cold. As if she were in battle, in a fight. "Tell me why you did it. Out loud."

"Mai-"

"Chief Durante."

She was human. He had to keep reminding himself of that as he bit back the fear of her. "You kill aliens so easily. We have done so, so easily, for the war. Things are different now, in a place I'm… more readily able to understand."

"I'm not an inept." She was… hurt? That word was on the tip of JD's mind. She was hurt by him and his insinuations. He thought her not in control of herself. No, he should've realized earlier. She was trained to control to the finest point of human capability, and a little beyond. It was just parameters, orders, that kept her in check, and she had her orders. She was also rational. "I know why you think that, JD."

JD put out his cigarette on his shoulder pauldron as he craned his neck, trying to see her face, hiding behind her helmet and visor.

She didn't turn though, looking out at the white and green of that park-like place.

"It's hard for me. To not do what you think I'll do." Short words was all she knew how to talk in this conversation. She couldn't mince if she tried. "But I can take it."

"I know. I know." JD said in pace with his breaths. "I just have to worry."

"Worry about yourself, Chief Durante."

He looked away from her. "Not too good at that." She had a point though. He worried for people. It kept him occupied, perhaps purposeful. The silence went on for minutes, trying to reclaim the peace that had been forced upon them, trying to make the best of it.

"I'm sorry." JD started after a while. It was easy to talk to her like this. She deserved it. "I should trust you better."

"Can you?"

JD's brown eyes flashed with an honesty, his nose taking in a breath as the sky cars above zoomed. "I have to try."

Mai's right hand had gone flat, mouth level, only then to move forward and down as she turned her head at JD, the hand moving in his direction. A single amused huff had come from his mouth. He didn't consciously know about the smile that rested on it after. He wasn't surprise that she was picking this stuff up fast. Faster than him.

"I- I've been using the extranet to look up phrases. Words."

"Cheater."

"I don't cheat."

_Thank you. _She said thank you to him.

He had given her a thumbs up and she acknowledged in a nod. She didn't understand when she signed thank you back however. He saw the confusion in her subtle helmet movement.

"I mean-" He looked away, wishing he didn't stub out that cigarette. "Thank you, for trying to learn. It's… been a long time." Those that did know he signed didn't show much interest afterward. Maybe sparse conversation fodder if they lived long enough to have it with him, but none had tried to understand it fundamentally. "Why, by the way?"

"Hm?"

"The Spartan Signs, I understand, but what- this." His right hand came to his forehead, three fingers touching it before drawing down, thumb and pinky out, signing a Y. He signed the word for _why. _"Why bother? We have other things to learn."

Her answer had been brief, to the point. "To learn about you."

"Could just tell ya'." He said after a moment of taking that in.

"Is that… how it is? Normally?"

_Perhaps_. JD thought.

Their comms buzzed and they were brought out of themselves.

_"Hitman 1-Actual, 1-3, 1-4, please respond." _It was Shepard.

Mai had taken the message with a nod as JD put his helmet on. "1-4. Go ahead 1-Actual."

_"1-Actual. There was a Quarian spotted outside of the embassy, purple visor, off-white and lavender body suit. Her name is Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, was trying to barge into the place. Can you find her and rendezvous at Citadel tower?"_

Mai and JD shared a gaze before. It was a helluva a fetch, but they could handle it. "1-4. Copy all. We're moving. Out."

Quarians. They knew a little about them, but even Alliance records of them were sparse compared to the Turians.

Still, they had a mission that drove them out of Udina's office at a brisk pace, down the stairs and- Mai looked left and saw a very familiar face.

They stared each other up, when their cells were right across from each other in Altis. Usze Tahamee knew her well, better than any among his kind now. She had left her mark on him and he had waited till the day he could repay it in kind.

**"Demon."**

He was about half an hour late to this, but he had responded the same as Karonee, half way. Mai had already been over that, but it had been for another reason: She recognized him. From the cell, and from the fight on Altis. He fought her to a standstill. To death even, maybe.

JD again had momentarily freaked, but calmed himself as the Minor on the other side of the stairs simply stared him down and away, to the Asari at the front desk.

"Uh- Hi."

The attendant smiled up at him from her desk with a customer service smile. "Hello, how may I help you?"

"Did you happen to see a Quarian around here?"

"Oh." Her mood soured. "That… Sangheili?" JD nodded as the Asari questioned the name. "Sangheili guard spoke to her quite a bit."

She pointed at Usze as Mai held her ground by him. She didn't know quite what to do. She always killed those she was engaged with and this Elite before her, he had been the first to get away. He didn't know what to do either, the Prophet had said that Humanity hadn't been their enemy anymore, and the revelations from inside Udina's office hadn't been told to him yet. He froze, as did she. This close again and the electricity between them stalled as suddenly they had to talk to him.

"I remember you." Mai ground out.

"So do I." He responded back, only after a moment of surprise, remembering that this Demon had been a female.

It had been odd to hear her, a Demon, speak his language. It was thanks to the translator, but still it rendered this confrontation odd.

JD had slowly walked up to him, uneasily proceeding as Mai and him had been stuck in a staring contest of inaction. They wanted to kill each other, yes, but here? It didn't feel quite right, and they had their orders.

The ODST had to stop himself as he opened his mouth. His life had certainly turned out differently than it should've he decided then and there, restarting his sentence. "I need to ask you a question."

Usze turned to JD. "Why would I even speak to you?"

Very true. JD looked around at the crowds past the archway that led to these embassies, maybe he could've gotten a middle-man? No. Useless, they both understood each other completely.

"I don't want to either but-" He laughed to himself. He sounded like his father talking to a suspect. "What the hell, man."

"Hmph. Human laughter. It's ridicoulous." The hostility in his voice was only warranted when Mai continued where JD struggled to make sense of what he was doing.

"There was a Quarian speaking to you. Where'd she go."

She spoke as if he did something to the Quarian. Usze ignored her, looking off. Mai wanted to wring his neck but she couldn't out of proper decency. Udina had enough trouble to not be dealing with blood at his doorstep.

She would've waited a month for an answer before she did beat it out of him, but thankfully there was a more readily available solution in the form of a flash of blue.

A Turian had rushed the trio, and again, the three of them had been worried about the same thing. First time it had been the Alliance Marines rushing them on Altis, now it had been a Turian in his blue C-Sec armor, blue tattoos along the bottom ridges of his eyes denoting him. He seemed hurried, panting as he stopped in front of them. He was no danger, but he seemed either in danger or looking for it.

"You." He regarded Usze. "Did you see a Quarian come past here? Purple, yay high?" He made the height with his talons.

He nodded. At least it had been the proper authorities asking. "She was… annoying." He gave side eye to Mai.

"Alive at least." He said to himself, far louder than he should've. "Where is she?"

"Tali Zorah?" JD had spoke. The Turian had almost shouted, grabbed his shoulders, when he said her name. Yeah, he was a cop JD knew. He seemed panicked enough.

"Do you know anything about where she is?"

"No, we're looking for her too. For Commander Shepard." The Turian nodded at them in satisfaction, trusting them in that moment.

"Do you?" The Turian came back to Usze. "Please. My name is _**Garrus Vakarian**_. C-Sec."

Usze tilted his head like a dog, perplexed. "A few of your officers were chasing her already, did you not-?"

"Spirits!" Garrus cursed as he thumbed the safety on his pistol, going to his omni. "This is Officer Vakarian, be advised there are- How many?"

Usze remembered. "Two. One Turian. One human."

"There are two hitmen posing as C-Sec Officers in the vicinity of the Embassies and the upper wards. I need an APB on all unbadged officers."

Police chatter, all too familiar to JD, barked back at Garrus. He readied his SMG. "We're going with you Officer Vakarian." Mai nodded in concert.

Garrus stared up at Mai, all thoughts and grievances thrown out the window. He could ask questions later if these were some of Shepard's people. "Okay fine, more the merrier. How about you? You know which direction she went, right?"

Usze planted his feet. "I will remain here, Turian."

"An innocent life is at stake, don't you realize-!?"

The sound of a hover chair. Usze had made note to watch over his shoulder more as he felt long fingers touch his shoulders from behind. Mai and JD backed up, distance between at least the length of an energy sword swing.

The touch had been Destiny. "You may, go, Major. If the innocent is at stake."

Karonee had stepped into view with her people, filling out the staircase. She nodded in conjunction with Destiny silently.

"But, your holiness, the Demon-"

"Is of no matter. If she and her Imp shall come, so be it. Humanity is not our enemy here, even if they do harbor vermin. We'll respect their wishes."

Garrus Vakarian had long known in the last twenty-four hours that his life was going to be a lot more complicated. With the attack on Eden Prime and he being assigned by C-Sec to report to the Council. So the complications of his life were readily expanded as he stood before the Covenant, and a holy Prophet allowed one of them to work with him.

"Were it so easy." Usze had said the idiom of his people. He checked the ammo in his Carbine, his helmet hook at his hip as he slid it on. "This way. We should go, I have her scent."

"Thank you." Garrus bowed his head, hoping it was respectful to Destiny. Destiny only bowed his head back as the strangest search party on that side of the galaxy took off into the Citadel.


	13. 1-7: War, Internal - Once a Rookie

A/N: After this chapter we should be off to the galaxy and shorter chapters. Thank you for all the reviews! Really helped me do this chapter a bit with Usze and what and what I should put in the story, going forward!

Read and enjoy and, next chapter, expect a longer Author's Note! So if you have any questions you'd like answered, place 'em in a review or come to me about it!

* * *

** _Section 1-7_ **

** _War, Internal - Once a Rookie_ **

* * *

A lull in the discussions with Udina and other Citadel diplomats, leaving the Covenant in that meeting room in silence and by themselves. Today had been a very special day on the Citadel: it marked the return of the Quarian envoys after three centuries. When lopped into the procession with the Covenant, no one had wanted to outright say no. Not when the common public had first been exposed to the Jiralhanae, the Sangheili, and the Hunters and seen a coalition of peoples who had known nothing but to wage war. The Sangheili stood tall: the Jiralhanae, taller still, were dwarfed by the forms of the Lekgolo. The physique of the warrior races of the Covenant were not to be understated, at least two feet taller than the average Turian, matched only by the Elcor. They were imposing yes, but it helped that, for the first time in years, those that came aboard the Citadel representing the Covenant wore the garb of their ancient people's envoys, hastily put together by an engineering and production department on the Solace already overworked. It was fine though, to Shipmistress Karonee. Her rank as a Fleet Master afforded her armor and garb befit for this situation anyway, her cloak resting over half her body as she slouched in her padded seat alongside the other chosen envoys.

The Brute Mercaius had crossed his arms, his chair barely fitting him as they awaited the return of Destiny and the Quarian Envoy the Migrant Fleet had sent for them. They had gone off alone for refreshment: to stretch the legs.

The gravity of what the rest of them were doing however had stayed the rest of their feet.

"Shipmistress." Mercaius had asked for her attention, the empty chair of Destiny between them. He hadn't turned his head, and neither did Karonee when she responded.

"Yes, Brute?"

"No less than several meters from us, lie a Demon and an Imp." A fact that all of them there had been wearily aware of. The Unggoy representative had been quivering in his seat just being reminded of that fact, but many lesser people would. Even the Jackal had sniffed the air, just to confirm they had been there. "And we do nothing?"

"We serve at the pleasure of the Hierarch, Mercaius."

"So you agree with his decision?"

Karonee had looked at him finally, as did he. Her eyes showed the answer she didn't dare vocalize.

To let them live, when they could've been killed so easily, it went against everything she had known about killing Humans. The Demons were a source of endless pain and injury to the Covenant, to her men, and, undoubtedly, Mercaius's clan as well. She remembered something of his clan, then and there.

"Mercaius, your father, he was the War Chieftan onboard the Long Night of Solace, was he not?"

Mercaius's one nod was filled with heavy reverence. "He is lost to me now. Left behind on Reach."

"You have my sympathies."

He seemed unbothered. He knew he wouldn't be dead. "He would want me to kill Demons. Just as he did."

The elder Brute of the Clan Blood Moon had been a Chieftain who had survived and thrived since Harvest. It was why his entire clan, nearly a million individuals which in itself had clans within itself, had been given the prestigious honor of going on the Covenant's crusade on the super carrier that was the Solace. Of his many accomplishments, he could name the death of Demons among them.

"That would be the only way to prove yourself as new Chieftain, then?"

Mercaius shuffled uncomfortably, his hammer hanging by a sling on the back of the chair. "I will hold no secret from you, Shipmistress. Talk from the clans across the Covenant speak of you kindly. You do not hold your species's usual… disposition, toward the Brutes."

She respected them.

Perhaps it was consequence of being the only female Fleetmaster of the Covenant that made her sympathize, or maybe, just maybe, it had been because she found council in a Brute Chieftain long ago, but in any case, she held no real ill-will against his people.

She gruffed, affirming.

"So I will tell you that on your ship, the Brutes demand a leader who was on the measure of my father. They need to see me fight. To prove myself."

To fight. That idea had been on Karonee's mind recently. That's all she was supposed to do, and yet, here she had been, playing politics in a galaxy not her own. All her life she had wanted to achieve the greatness found only in the crusade of the Great Journey, but without it, what remained?

"Greatness can be achieved in others, young Brute."

"But none recognized by my people." He spoke back, coldly.

True perhaps. Karonee's fingers traced her cape, the designs embraided by her after every battle of her fleet. What would replace that glory? It certainly wasn't drifting from conference room to conference room, officializing their existence among the galaxy.

"They deserve to die, anyway." He went on. "Do they not?'

The sword on her hip burned. Her heart burned for a Demon's blood. But she knew better than to question the decision of a Hierarch. "We are not judges. Only executors."

_Only._

The Jackal representative's whiskers were scratched as he shrugged against his chair. "I'm missing a payout, ignoring them." Shrewdly said. "Prophets pay a hefty bounty for Spartans."

Karonee chuckled. Were it so easy to think like a Jackal.

* * *

Her first impressions of the Covenant had been colorful, peaceful enough, at best. However, at the back of her mind there had been a worst-case situation that played out. It hadn't been hers. It had been Udina's, and Anderson's, and, most pressingly, Chief Gul's and Chief Durante's. Secrets belied her purpose, and lies made her blood curdle, sour. She lived for the truth, and nothing less. She hadn't killed for less in her life and that was the promise in her own blood.

Though immersed in the peaceful visage of the Presidium, there was nothing there that could take her mind off the fact that Anderson had taken two soldiers of hers from her, after they responded so viscerally to an alliance of aliens. In the shadow of the Krogan monument, Shepard had bided her time. It was all she could do after waiting a good hour outside of the Citadel tower elevator and not being able to hail Anderson or Udina.

She was liable to get side tracked.

The Asari Consort, Sha'ira, had been spoken of in rumors as far as her ear would listen in to the crowds, and her office had just been right across the way. It had been her luck that the supposed long waits for her presence had been cut off for her because of who she was.

_"I don't make any promises, but I'll see what I can do."_

That, among other words that graced her own lips, should've been her catch phrase in her life at this point along with her penchant need to announce that she was going every time she bowed out of a conversation, power move as it was.

What it meant however was that she knew what it was like to chase favors for people. She didn't get that far in life sticking to her own problems alone; to help people was to help herself.

"Really going to do some Asari's dirty laundry Commander?" Ashley had tilted her head at Shepard as they left her office.

Shepard had breathed out tiredly. "You act like we're preoccupied with anything else."

Ashley had opened her mouth to respond, but had no answer, shrugging instead. The elder woman knew her concern though. "Trust me Williams, in this galaxy I'd rather make friends than lose them. And to be frank, anything I do reflects well upon humanity."

"Well that's always been the case with you, Commander." Kaiden had more than reminded Shepard of who she was.

So, they had done the Consort's favor, resolved a rather petty relationship issue, and was given a trinket because of it. She was a fan of souvenirs and, at the very least, found a bar she could go to after the Council was done grilling her for doing her best.

"Do you think that a human woman has any chance in that bar? I mean, come on." Ashley and Kaiden had been waxing eloquent about both her casual racism and strippers on the railing. "I mean, you'll catch me dead if you find me in a skirt, but I like to think the Asari aren't all that swell."

Kaiden crossed his arms as he glanced at Shepard, sitting on a bench below the Krogan and obviously lost in her own thoughts. Nothing to worry about, hopefully, but if anyone needed peace and quiet in that galaxy, it had been Shepard. "I'm not saying I'm into this sort of stuff Williams, but you think I have an opinion on Asari strippers?"

Ashley pouted. "I mean you must be interested in women, and they look enough like one."

Shepard heard Kaiden gruff. She might've had an opinion to interject, but she was too much lost in her own thoughts, arms behind her head as she stared up at the passing sky cars backlit by the artificial heavenly light.

Something was wrong with Chief Gul. She wasn't qualified to clinically diagnose, but she had seen enough war to see what it did to those who could never escape the battlefield in their minds. She was one of those people, if anything. She had her nightmares, her memories, of people that lived only in her past. Things she could've done better, done differently, to save them, haunted her. That is why she saw the same sort of edge in Mai. The way she fought, the way she reacted to threats, it was absolute, without mercy. She was rage incarnate, a pressurized gasket about to blow, held in only by that armor. That armor did not protect her, no, it protected the world from her. That's what Shepard thought based on how quickly she went for her gun in Udina's office with the Covenant, and how much it seemed to hurt her that she was not able to do anything.

It was like watching a cosmic entity rip into a black hole, or a sky car hit a building.

She had history with the Covenant, and yet they had only been there for a few weeks. Even her Spec Ops deployments took months of preparation. The Alliance, save for the initial incursion onto Altis, had no reason or ability to go to war with the Covenant. And yet Mai identified them as a threat.

Were they a threat? Why were they a threat?

Who were they? Chief Gul, and Chief Durante.

Idly, she opened up her omni-tool. There hadn't been more than a 100 N7s in Alliance history, and no more than thirty or so alive or active at the same time. She was one of the more recent additions, young, if anything. Young meant that those that graduated and were awarded that grade with her had good interest in keeping in touch with each other, despite Op Sec. Whoever were their commanders probably wouldn't be happy that they had done this, but there had been a private messaging channel set up and used by Shepard and her fellow N7s.

She looked into the barebones messaging system and saw the last three messages from about a week ago.

_N7-66: Sangheili, warrior race? I'd like to see what they do against a Turian._

_N7-72: The Old Man's squad was on Altis, saw a few get roughed up. I'll dig for footage._

_N7-66: Aight._

They were talking about the Covenant, unsurprisingly, and any N7 worth their metal had harbored some interest in seeing how they fought. That wasn't her curiosity today however as she typed in her message:

_N7-58: Durante, Gul, do those names ring anything to anyone?_

Moments passed after she sent it, looking to Ashley and Kaiden go on about whether or not a Turian stripper would've turned Kaiden on. "Yeah I like men too, so what?"

"It's a very masculine race, even the female Turians look the same!"

Ashley's racism had been endearing to Shepard. She just hadn't known the galaxy yet. Pressly had been the same sort, but he knew better to know that what he was saying was wrong, inherently. If anything Ashley's prejudices could be somewhat justified, given who she was, who her grandfather had been in relation to the galaxy.

Her omni-tool rang.

_N7-51: Negatory 58._

A string of responses carried on within the next minute, all giving her the negative.

_N7-66: Who?_

_N7-58: New crew. Project MJOLNIR-equipped. Armor system._

_N7-66: Never heard of it._

_N7-58: Me neither. And they usually use us for prototyping stuff like that too._

_N7-51: You mean those of us who kiss enough ass to actually get our gear paid for by the Alliance._

Shepard chuckled at 51 as an asides. The Alliance issued gear, yes, but the good stuff was bought off the counter anyway they could find. It was as if it was World War 1 all over again and they had to outfit themselves. Her chuckled cut though, a chill through her spine as another message came up.

_N7-06: Ask Anderson, Shepard._

They didn't use names in the chat, usually. Op Sec and all. However, there was a man there that had already gone over enough lines, crossed enough people, that he paid no heed to it. He didn't care.

_N7-58: He won't tell me, Old Man._

She knew who he was. Everyone did, and the messaging went silent, it felt like, save for her and for him.

_N7-06: Because it's a rabbit hole, Shepard. Go down it, and you might not come back._

_N7-58: I can take it._

_N7-06: I couldn't._

"Shepard." Shepard jerked in her seat looking up, omni away, spooked. "Sorry I kept you waiting, talks with the Covenant went on longer than we expected."

Thankfully Anderson hadn't been in said messaging chat, so Shepard shook herself straight and coughed. "Sorry-" She didn't know why she was apologizing. "I toured around a bit, met a few locals, during the wait." Standing up from the bench she squared herself, arms behind her back.

Anderson nodded dismissively. "That's fine, Commander."

The two of their eyes drew to the monument behind them, casting its shadow: a Krogan triumphant. "Think Chief Gul could take one on?" She asked Anderson, probing his pitted face with her eyes as he answered. It took a few long moments, but he did answer cautiously.

"More than one. She's special, no doubt you've learned now."

"She not an N7?"

Anderson shook his head. "Her and Chief Durante, they were… one off deals. Prototypes for a training regimen. They were extra tough on them, but it just wasn't efficient to continue on with it."

Shepard flashed with shock on her face. She saw Gul scalp a Geth Destroyer. "Seemed worth it to me."

"Not at the cost we've-" Anderson stopped for a moment. "Not at the cost they've paid."

Shepard wiggled the arm with her omni. "I got their dossiers, a lot of black ink."

"For me too, Commander, what you know I know about them."

Lies. Shepard detested them as fire detests water. The way she fought back was then to burn hotter, burn brighter. It was in her eyes and Anderson knew she was being lied to. No glare, no mean face, nothing like that. It was just the intrinsic knowledge that Shepard had a truth to look for. And where it led her, she would tear it open.

"What's our play for the Council?"

Anderson motioned to Kaiden and Ashley to bring it in. "We we tell the truth. We saw that what happened to us was out of our control and the lack of any precaution from the Citadel on Prothean technology caused us to fail in its containment. Udina has most of that front covered."

"What about that Turian?" Ashley spoke of Nihlus.

"Is Nihlus okay?" Kaiden asked sincerely. Anderson nodded.

"He's at Huerta Memorial right now. Stable now, at least, but still in a coma."

Even Ashley could be impressed. "Tough son of a bitch."

"What about that other one he mentioned? Saren." All they had was a radio transmission, his name spoken before it all cut out, Shepard burned that name into her memory. "If he was present, it meant the Council knew more about the mission than they let on."

"I would have an idea why he would be there, Commander, but if that was his reason, then the Normandy's mission was compromised before it even began."

"So that's our goal then? Just convince the Council they never intended for us to succeed here?" Shepard wasn't exactly comfortable with this sort of politicking. It didn't seem… clean. Her gaze drifted over to the statue in front of the Council tower, she and Kaiden heard it both: that low hum, drawl, present only whenever a biotic was using Eezo. She chose the Krogan instead of that to wait for Anderson at. Its dark lines and machine-like construction was perhaps an art piece, put together by some biotic individual by their powers, which might've explained the residual energy she felt from it. But no matter the case it seemed… familiar. Perhaps it in itself was some Prothean beacon the Council had long known its secrets of, shaped like a Relay.

"I don't like it either, but we know it this way: There's nothing we could've done."

And those words had injured Shepard then and a thousand times before. _There's nothing she could've done to stop this._

* * *

Bad elevator music was something in every culture. Shepard preferred stairs, but here, she didn't have a choice. "Where are the Chiefs anyway?" Passing the time on the ride up the tower.

"Standing by at the Embassy." Anderson said simply, nothing more, nothing less, as the doors of the elevator opened to a long hallway, leading down to the chambers that had been the center of the center of the Galaxy.

The grand high ceilings which offered a view into space was fitting for the seat of galactic power. Gardens below glass floors gave nature its place here and ambassadors and other politicians made themselves busy in the tiered floorplan that had been the Council Chambers. Right ahead of the human group:

Executor Pallin and a group of C-Sec officers, all confronting one Turian more:

Blue had denoted this one, from the markings of his face to the Turian standard C-Sec armor. He was of a younger sort, Shepard could tell, the way his voice sounded over their translators led credence to that as he pleaded with Pallin. Over his left eye had been some sort of combat interface glass. She'd seen the like before. In that new day and age with Mass Effect based weaponry, the gun was often more accurate than the person. The tech helped bridge that gap.

"I'm telling you, Executor, it's too soon to call this case, especially since Turian remains came up on Eden Prime that were not part of Nihlus!"

The Turian was fighting for a case done right, but Pallin saw it differently as he stepped into the Turian's space. "This case is cut and dry, Vakarian. You will go up there during the hearing, and present only the concise truth of this all. Facts only. No conjecture. You are not to judge." The four humans approached the group and the C-Sec officers all quieted.

"Executor." Anderson reached out a hand, and Pallin had shaken it.

"Captain."

"Who's this?" Anderson tipped his head at the almost dejected Turian that had been being mouthed to in the deep tones of Pallin. Pallin saw it at least honorable the Turian introduce himself, tipping his head at him.

With a small twitch of his mandibles, coughing some phlegm in his throat, he began. "Garrus Vakarian. I'm in charge of the Citadel's investigation into the assault of Nihlus and the Prothean beacon's destruction."

"…And the Geth, Eden Prime?"

Garrus seemed hurt to even say this. "I'm sorry, those are matters of Systems Alliance policy, not Council."

"So you just don't care?" Shepard knew her words, said them well and in the right places. She used words like weapon and all C-Sec in the area had cringed. Garrus Vakarian cared. Of course, he did, his eyes open as his mandibles clamped down into a lock almost. He wanted to say something, desperately, personally, but his boss had been to his side with half of the department while the Councilors themselves were to his back figuratively.

"It's not that, it's just not my jurisdiction." He stammered.

Shepard's face was one of her best assets. She liked to think her face was aesthetically pleasing when she did spare any thought on it, but truly she appreciated on how in its idle state, her face was a judgmental one. Judgmental in the way an owl looks down on the forest floor in midnight light. Soft, yet knowing, mature, but eyes wide open like that of child who dreamed of stars. To be looked at by her was like to be vulnerable; her smolder expected much of the world and those who fell into it, highlighted by matte, almost lipstick colored hair.

Garrus and Pallin fell into it. "One of my men. Richard Jenkins- That planet was his home. He risked insubordination in order to stay there and tend to the dead. Way he saw it, if no one cared, he would care alone. Is he alone? Has he been wronged by this galaxy? Officer Vakarian? Executor Pallin?"

"Shepard…" Garrus let her name fall out of his mouth. She was entrancing. Almost unnatural as she seemed to recede back into Anderson's shadow.

"How are proceedings going to go?" Captain Anderson just wanted this all done with.

Pallin kicked himself out of Shepard's trance, answering Anderson. "As we said, C-Sec conducted an investigation into the events on Eden Prime. This hearing is focused on whether or not humanity is at fault for the failure of securing that Prothean artifact, and subsequently, Commander Shepard's ability to act as a Spectre."

Garrus looked away, and Shepard looked at him again. "Something we should know, Officer Vakarian?"

Garrus had given a glance at Pallin, and before he could stop him, he spoke up. "Any investigation related to the Spectres, things get murky. Real murky. That's why we can't confirm whether or not there was more than one Spectre on the ground."

Pallin scoffed with a hand wave. "It's all conjecture, Vakarian. You say that and your investigation gets thrown out."

"I know, sir." Garrus grounded out.

"But what if there were more Spectres on the ground?" Shepard pressed. "We couldn't have acted to our best ability if we didn't know who or what was in the area."

Pallin had looked to the rest of the cadre of men. "Get ready." The group moved off, leaving him with Garrus and Anderson's group. Waiting for them to get out of earshot, he spoke, a huff out of his nose. "Any group that doesn't answer or abide by a common rule of law, who relies on its members to make judgement which puts lives at stake, well- I just don't agree with it fundamentally. So I'd love to take them down a peg."

For once he and Vakarian were in agreement. "I'm certain someone else was there. The remains of a Turian arm was left behind."

_"Garrus." _Pallin almost snapped at the younger Turian.

Shepard had remembered taking a knee with JD over Nihlus. Both of his arms, although badly mutilated and burned, had still been on. "What?"

Garrus blinked, now or never. "There was a Turian arm, _an arm_, left behind near where Nihlus was attacked. Nihlus arrived to the Citadel with all his appendages, so it means that whoever did that to him probably didn't get away untouched."

"Shouldn't that be it then?!" Ashley spoke up, almost dumb founded.

Pallin sighed tiredly as Garrus leaked their investigation to the people that absolutely needed that information kept from them, but yet, he spoke. This bothered him as much as anything. "The arm was burnt down to the bone, little DNA remains but we can keep looking. However the fact Ambassador Udina insists that Saren Arterius was there, and therefore, this might be his arm, it doesn't make the Council exactly fond of the idea."

"Saren's their top agent." Anderson said with a certain amount of dread and scorn.

"No one would believe that he'd be responsible for attacking Nihlus. He taught him, of all things." Garrus breathed, annoyed as he looked to his feet. "But I'm sure I can prove something. I just need more time."

"The hearing is now, Garrus. You don't get more time."

Shepard furrowed her brow, looking up to the Councilors busying themselves as they awaited the hearing to commence. "Can't we just call Saren? If he's missing an arm, then we can just verify it by, well, looking at him."

Garrus seemed to want to shake in his feet, a punching bag hadn't been close enough. "Spectres get to go off-grid whenever they feel for the sake of their classified ops. He's not answering any of our hails."

"To be honest, this investigation seems a bit stacked against us." Shepard leveled a hand on her cheek. Pallin saw through it however. He knew what she was insinuating and couldn't be more wrong.

"I'll make it clear to you, Captain Anderson, Commander Shepard, the nature of this investigation is not to back the Council claims or yours. Just to verify what happened. I may not approve of the Council even giving you this light of day, but generally in a pissing match between the Spectres and Humanity, I'll back you, this time. So I ensure you, when we tell what was found here, it is not for the sake of kicking you down."

A ceremonial bell rung throughout that hall. It was time, the Council was convening for a hearing.

"Answer your questions truthfully. That's all you should do." Pallin shot a look at both Garrus and Shepard, but Anderson seemed a little more comfortable. This wasn't his first time answering for a failed Spectre membership.

Walking up those steps, the ambassadors and the emissaries from the races of the Council accrued on the sidelines. Shepard knew what limelight was, but this had been on a different level. Walking in the shadows of old gods, of the Protheans, just to be under the judgement of the Council.

They all stood there, waiting, at their terminals, C-Sec personnel pertinent to the investigation waiting on platforms surrounding the main addressing pathway: There was no direct connection to the Council, the closest was a walkway, a divide and a drop between them and there.

Time and time again, she would hope that she would do this with her life: Bring truth to power.

Here, at the center of the galaxy, she hoped so.

"Your name and duty, for the records, please." Councilor Tevos, representing the Asari, spoke to Shepard. She was the one on trial here. For she needed to be vindicated, to be innocent.

"My name is Commander Jane Kennedy Shepard of the Systems Alliance, N7. Posted on the SSV Normandy."

Sparatus, the Turian councilor, had already seemed decided in his verdict, and Valern's face read of disinterest. Humanity had been the galactic fuckups, and that was that.

"The purpose of this hearing today is to clarify your mission and effect on Eden Prime amidst the Geth Attacks and the recovery of a Prothean Beacon turned up during colonization efforts there." Tevos went on, officially. "The Citadel Council officially empathizes with humanity suffering a deadly attack from the Geth, and for that, we would offer you assistance in preparing for more Geth attacks, however the nature of your mission on Eden Prime did not arise from the Geth raid."

She stood at attention, as straight and squared as she could as her soldiers followed suit.

"This hearing will decide whether or not humanity, or you, are culpable for the loss of the Prothean Beacon."

* * *

They were. Long story short. Humanity had ownership of the beacon. Humanity was not able to secure their own colony leading to the circumstances which lead the Beacon to be recovered by the Geth. Shepard and her men should not have tried to approach the Beacon without further guidance and, perhaps more emotionally, had not been there for Nihlus when he went down.

Minute by minute, hour by hour, the second they got the SOS from Ashley's squad all the way to Shepard waking back up on the Normandy. Anderson was right, the story needed not to be told to him, but to the Council. Some of Garrus's men also on the investigation brought up points, about the Geth's tactics, how it very much looked like their objective was the extraction of the Beacon.

All the calls Shepard made were understandable, but they hadn't been the perfect expected of her.

Their only rebuttal? One name, one word, spoken by Nihlus before comms had been cut by him: Saren. The implication that the Council knew more than what they let on, intentionally withholding information from Anderson and Shepard.

But the path that led down was one Anderson was down before. If he was already on the Council's shitlist, he might as well had just outright said it: "Nihlus was attacked by Saren in order to make humanity look bad! To bring us to where we are right now!"

Saren was a name many of them knew: the finest Spectre of the Council. Its most ruthless. Only he could've solved the hostage crisis on Thessia ten years ago by claiming to back the hostage takers, only to shoot them in the back afterwards.

On the sidelines Pallin had shot a look at Garrus, drilling through him, daring him to say anything that would make Anderson not be the only one spouting that nonsense off. But it was true: Saren had a known distaste for humanity.

Saren trained his fair share of Spectres. All Turian, naturally, but some had come to be at least somewhat welcome in Human space. As was why Avitus Rix had been assigned to Altis by the Council as their hands on with the Covenant for the moment. As a character witness though, he was more willing than most to come forward and talk about his mentor:

Holographically displayed, on the holo pedestal to the Council's right, he spoke. "The Saren I know is ruthless, yes, but not crazy. He loved each of us as if we were his own, and to think of him doing… doing that? To Nihlus? It's my final word that I think it's unthinkable."

"Did Nihlus have any enemies then?" Anderson spoke. "Surely he must've gotten some in his service to the Council."

Avitus seemed distracted for a moment, the chitter chatter of Unggoy in the background. He was posted on the ground on Altis, keeping an eye on the Covenant, but, because of that, he had been quickly becoming one of the Galaxy's most acquainted with them. He heard the question however, answering true, if not somewhat cockily. "We all have enemies, Captain Anderson, it comes with the job, and I've done it for 15 year."

With nothing more to say, Councilor Tevos had looked to Avitus. "We have nothing more to ask you, Avitus, we hope your duties have been proceeding peacefully."

Avitus crossed his arms, looking off projector. "That's my hope, Councilor." The line went dead, and the character case of Saren had been shut and dry. Even if Saren was capable, he had no motive, no drive to put a bullet in the head of someone who had been raised by him.

"If Saren wanted Humanity to look bad, he should've just done nothing, because look where we are now." Sparatus spat poison at Shepard and Anderson.

Turians hated the humans, Salarians couldn't care any less, and the Asari tried to mediate. Galactic politics in a nut shell and they had been rounding the same point for the last few hours. All Shepard could do was tell her story as the gravity of what had happened to her kept her shoulders stiff.

Still, Sparatus saw that grit in her. "Commander Shepard, the purpose of this hearing is also, admittedly, still a part of your Spectre trial. To see whether or not you are fit to act as an instrument of the Council. I understand that the Spectre selection process is cruel and hard, however our choosing of you as a candidate was not without worth."

Anderson spoke, Garrus had spoken, the ground team had given their account of the attack. It was Shepard's words that carried the most weight their however as the woman of the hour.

"We understand your current position as an N7 in the Systems Alliance Marines gives you freedom that may be mirrored in the Spectres, and, we very much know what you've done with that power."

Shepard had been front and center, with the rest of the crew slunk away by the limelight. She was used to it, for they knew exactly what the Councilors were speak of. Rumors of a massacre perpetrated by her were made known to the Council when her record came by their desks.

Akuze had been the reason. Some had thought that her losses at Elysium had turned her into the Butcher of Torfan, however they were wrong at that. What had turned her into the Butcher of Torfan had been what had been done to her at Akuze: an entire unit, her unit, wiped out by what she could only dredge up as a science experiment by a human supremacist group named _Cerberus_. That agony of being the lone survivor she had turned to grief, and then, to rage.

Just after Akuze, on a planet far from Earth. It had been her a fireteam of N7s, led by her, waving down a civilian Mako with their shuttle.

All of them: Cerberus personnel. A fact only outright confirmed after the fact. It was a gamble, a risk, and the judgement that had passed onto them had been…

_"Out of the car! Now!" Shepard had screamed at the thirteen scientists inside of the Mako, forcing them out the back as the Mako was disabled, on the outskirts of the human colony._

_Men and women, employed for a black work that went beyond the Alliance. She didn't care for it, only that it had done her wrong. She had seen her entire unit wiped out, and the legend of the Butcher of Torfan came upon her again, this time against humankind._

_She didn't know why they had done it, where they were going, or what would happen to her. The N7s that came with her on that mission knew that pain well, and to see Shepard act on it was a cathartic release._

_The thirteen scientists had come out of the car, horded into one group at the back._

_They were terrorists._

_Shepard alone had gunned them down with one sweeping burst from her rifle. The bodies she buried that day painted the path forward to where she stood now in the galaxy. Maybe another Shepard wouldn't have done that, maybe another Shepard would've dealt with Cerberus later on, when she wasn't filled with grief over the loss of her unit. But she was a different Shepard. She was the Shepard who had lived a life before Eden Prime. She was the one who ran away from home as a child to wander Earth, who took to the stars and defended Elysium when no one else could, suffered Thresher Maws from Akuze and brought humanity upon a small moon full of pirates where, even now, the moon dust was tinted red from soldiers lost there._

She was reprimanded for it, surely, but not on the aspect of murder. She was reprimanded for not seeking official support for it, and because of it, had been given an extended leave. One that gave her time to hunt elk and bears in Alaska.

"The innocent, Council, the innocent, is who I did that for. And I would do it again for Nihlus, for all those on Eden Prime. Someone always pays, and I can tell you, sure as I can, what happened here is not mine to pay for."

Sparatus scoffed, folding his arms. "You sound like a Spectre, like Saren, admittedly."

She raised her eyebrow at him.

"Do you think I'm the person who would **not** save if I could?

The question hung over the halls like a curse. For everyone there knew what Shepard would do to save a life. Ends, justified by means, one might thing. But no, Shepard went deeper then that. Moral absolutism. Even without Saren implied to have messed everything up, his name drew again across the minds of the Council. If Saren, ruthless as he was, had a counterpart, it would be Shepard then.

That's what their whispers spoke to themselves sounded of.

"You cannot explain the failures of this mission if you cannot explain the details of why there was Turian remains found, there."

Pallin seemed to want to murder Garrus for even saying that on the sidelines, but the Councilors looked to him, nodding that that detail was correct. "I've gotten no updates on any bio trace with it. It was burnt to the bone… though we did find trace cybernetics on it."

Sparatus flared his nostrils as he looked back to Shepard. "The remains of a Turian arm are indeed intriguing but are no less indicative of Saren than they are of any other Turian that would be on Eden Prime, a developing colony. It is no question that some of my people have fallen into the type of life that would render them liable to stick around on human colonies for profit."

"There was indeed an arms market caught up in the dock where Nihlus and the remains were found," Pallin confirmed. This was news to Shepard.

Anderson spoke up. "When did you know this?"

"Internal investigations in gun running unrelated-"

"And the Alliance did not know this? What are you hiding from us? How could we have operated when information pertinent to this investigation and mission are held from us?" Shepard grated her teeth, her right hand balling to a fist before hitting the palm of her left. "Where was Saren then? At least tell us that."

"The Council and its Intelligence Services hold no further details on what happened on Eden Prime, Captain Anderson, Commander Shepard. The whereabouts of Saren provide no excuse as to your actions."

"But please then, tell me where is he? Where is his alibi?"

"Classified."

"Classified or you don't know?"

"Does it matter?"

"When it's his culpability is on the line."

"Which we have no basis to even pursue."

"Wouldn't it then, be so easy, to disprove any idea that Saren was not involved with Eden Prime if you yourselves knew where he was? To present that evidence that would render all of this moot and call me just incompetent?" She should've been a lawyer or a politician in another life.

It felt like they had gone over that point, time and time again from different angles. But that was the magic of Council hearings. Circularity was constant. "The nature of Spectre operations demand his radio silence. Even from us." Sparatus bit at her.

She bit back. "I may not be fit to be a Spectre, but I am fit enough to know that my blame lies not with what's been done to me and Eden Prime. The Geth, the perpetrators are still out there!" Her voice rang through halls not used to yelling, known only to reach heights by Krogan. "Render me guilty, or responsible, whatever- Just let me get out there, give me the prerogative, to go out there and make sure this doesn't happen to anyone else."

There was pleading in her voice, to go help those that needed help. While she was there, she wasn't doing her job.

Councilor Valern had taken his long finger to his chin, her words… odd. Tevos seemed equally intrigued as much as Sparatus viewed this as an outburst. The Turian couldn't open his mouth however as the Asari made a decision.

"This hearing is in break. Half an hour." Tevos had announced. "There is much to go over, and when we return, Commander Shepard's personal culpability shall be determined."

Ashley and Kaiden had played their part as witnesses, but asides from that there hadn't been much fanfare. Even the Turians seemed to detest another Williams had been before their step based on how Sparatus talked to her. The Councilors themselves had slunk back from their stands into their personal chambers, leaving those present in the Tower to take that much needed break. C-Sec personnel groaned as even Pallin slouched on his platform's chair among the stands, Garrus having been on his feet the entire time.

His impartiality was present, truly, but the bias toward the Saren idea had been noted.

Anderson dragged his worn hands across his face as the murmur of idle chatter took place throughout the chamber, Shepard still standing straight and defiant as her men behind her approached. "I don't know what they want, Shepard. Out of you, that is." He said to her, barely turning his way as, all it once it seemed, at the lip of her own walkway before the Council, breathed heavily in one exhale.

"I've fought Batarians, Captain, I can do hearings." Was all she said, Ashley, out of the corner of her eye, giving two taps of her fist over her heart, standing in solidarity, prideful of another Marine.

Kaiden had seen the blue-tattooed Garrus Vakarian approach the humans, but he stepped in his way, not out of malice, but of a question. "I thought you were going to be a pain in the ass."

Garrus only barely chuckled. "To you? Probably not. To everyone who wants this hearing done cleanly though? Well, if the Spectres are being dirty, I can be too." The Turian officer did everything short of filibuster with his report, highlighting Geth strength, Alliance procedure with Prothean artifacts, the nature of Spectres showing up unannounced on missions and Council accountability, along with prior human attempts to join the ranks of the Spectres. It was impressive, and quite frankly, to Shepard at least, worthy of at least-

"Hey, Vakarian right?" She reached out her hand. Garrus knew the human movement of a handshake. Not many human C-Sec officers, but enough to recognize a handshake. He nodded as he clasped her hand.

"Garrus Vakarian." He huffed, not too happy about himself apparently. "This is the shortest turn around I've ever had on a case, and I've worked some pretty hot ones."

Shepard had given the Turian a smile. "Appreciate what you do. Can't imagine it's easy."

He shrugged. "I'm not about to let the Spectres get off on this one, especially if Saren was there."

"Have a history?" Shepard tilted her head.

"Nah," He shook his own. "I just know what he's done. Ain't a Turian to be proud of, that's for sure." With one finger wipe, he beckoned them all to follow. "C-Sec has a table with refreshments, I think you're entitled to it."

Ashley seemed uncomfortable, but no one else seemed to mind.

"Sir, do you know how the Alliance fleet is responding to the attack on Eden Prime?" Shepard's point was her belief. She still worried about human space after that attack.

Anderson nodded in understanding as they walked. "1st and 3rd fleet and moving toward forward stations among the colonies. Marine QRF forces are making patrols as planetary militias gear up."

"Don't supposed I missed anything else?"

"They vectored in from the Terminus Systems. So, it gives Turian patrol fleets an excuse to widen their formations, but asides from that we're the only ones in place to get affected by the Geth."

"How about the Quarians? I know they've been busy."

Shepard hadn't read too much into the Quarians, she knew of their plight, their relationship with the Geth, but hadn't even seen one. Anderson had nothing to say in particular. "They've been busy with the Covenant, ever since the Sangheili found out-" He chose his words well. The nature of the Covenant's displacement wasn't entirely public yet. "Ever since they found out about their common heritage."

"Strange thing," Shepard agreed. "Displacement by an FTL test. They extragalactic?"

"They're familiar with our stars, last I checked. I haven't been briefed." Shepard really had to have been worried with her own people lying to her, on that day of days, but she didn't notice as they approached the hastily put up refreshment table. Donuts, the Turian equivalent of donuts, coffee, and the Turian equivalent of coffee along with a smattering of other foods.

She was liable to have a sweet tooth. Sweet and salt had been her tastely preferences. It was why she had wolfed down a donut while immediately following it with a salami sandwich. "Hell of an appetite." Kaiden made the snide remark.

She shrugged. "You don't be me without being hungry a lot." She knew hunger, of both the stomach and of the heart. Both were being tested there today.

Anderson glanced down at his omni, and that had given him reason to leave. He of all people had been at the foot of the console for far too long in his life, and had nothing to show for it. "I have to call the Ambassador, tell him how we're doing."

"He wasn't watching?" Ashley seemed disappointed.

The Captain shook his head. "He was busy delegating with the Covenant. Besides, he's already done what he needed to do: get us this hearing in the first place. If you can excuse me."

When Anderson walked off, Garrus had walked back into the circle Shepard had made with her Marines, sipping on their coffee. It'd been a long day, understandably.

"I had to read up a lot on you, Commander Shepard. C-Sec says this ain't the first time you've been under this kind of pressure."

The paper cup Shepard was sipping coffee from strained beneath her gloves. They were all still geared up, despite the fact this has been a civilian station. There was probably cause to look like how they were: the dirt and synthetic oil from Eden Prime still was spotted on them. "I ain't never had a hearing where I regret what I did, Officer Vakarian."

It was unkind what she said and she knew it. She didn't regret a damn thing, even if it felt like murder at the time.

Garrus raised his hands defensively, feeling the pressure of Shepard put upon him and not the coffee cup. "Oh, I wasn't implying anything negative, Commander. I was just gonna say what you did to those Cerberus Scientists might be the reason why the Council is still considering you for Spectre work. It's… right up your alley supposedly."

Shepard chuckled, letting the dark drink pass by her lips again. "Am I easy to paint like that?"

Garrus's mandibles twitched before he answered. "Humanity is very prideful of you."

She smiled at that. "The version of me the Alliance lets out, of course."

Garrus was going to say something to the contrary: to have a human take a stand against a Spectre that might've not been there, but was known to antagonize mankind, it was a move. But he didn't then, not when his omni-tool rang and he had a call to take.

"Hello?"

_"Garrus, I- I don't know. But-"_ The voice seemed unsure of itself as soon as the line picked up, but Garrus recognized her.

"What is it Doctor Michel?"

_"I remember our last chat, during lunch, about the case you're working on now, and a patient of mine seemed to be related. She came in a few days ago, and I just didn't know if it was right to tell you."_ The woman's voice was thick with a French accent.

"What?!" If there was a roof and Garrus had been a few hundred feet taller the way he sprung up would've put his head through it.

_"Tali Zorah, that was her name, a Quarian with a purple visor and a whitish, lavender environmental suit. She came to me speaking about a Turian- Spectre, in fact, about the attack on Eden Prime. She'd been shot and… she wouldn't tell me who did it. She was scared, on the run, she asked me about the Shadow Broker-"_ Those words had caused Garrus to tense up, cutting her off. It certainly made Shepard lean in.

"Where are you right now, Dr. Michel?" Garrus vibrated where he stood.

_"In my clinic, why?"_

"I'd like to talk to you in person, stay in place. I'm gonna have someone pick you up."

_"Okay- come soon."_ The line was cut.

"We heard all of that." Shepard noted as Garrus seemed more on edge, even Ashley and Kaiden were interested. It was vindicating. "Not something I think you want to leak out."

"No it's fine, I think this would be something you'd want to hear anyway… Say, you think you'd be down to prove your innocence? Good half-an-hour hustle to clear your name and vindicate yourself?" For someone reason the Turian seemed more comfortable, more willing to do this as this certainly seemed to be played outside of the C-Sec playbook.

Shepard could only smirk. It was too perfect. "Worth a shot… I have a lead you know, on that Quarian."

Again Garrus seemed to spring himself up frantically. "Please, tell me what you know."

"I saw her back by the Embassies, wanted to speak to I think Ambassador Udina about wanting to give information."

"Did she speak to anyone?"

"No one but the Sangheili guard, the red one."

"Got it. Hey, there's a bar nearby lower markets in the wards. Chora-"

"Chora's Den?"

Garrus seemed impressed she knew. "Yeah, a local lackey of the Shadow Broker owns the place, Fist. We brought in a Krogan who was gonna carry through with a hit on him recently, so it seems that he might be out of the Shadow Broker's favor. See if you can't get to him and ask if this Quarian had already made contact."

"What're you gonna do?"

"Get this Quarian."

"You'll need help then." Before Garrus could decline, she sent off the message. "Hitman-1 Actual, 1-3, 1-4, please respond."

Mai had responded without pause. _"1-4. Go ahead 1-Actual."_

"1-Actual. There was a Quarian spotted outside of the embassy, purple visor, off-white and lavender body suit. Her name is Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, was trying to barge into the place. Can you find her and rendezvous at Citadel Tower?"

Not even a hesitation. _"1-4. Copy all. We're moving. Out."_

"Who was-?"

"You'll recognize them when you see 'em. Just head to our embassy."

With one two fingered salute Garrus had ran off, leaving Shepard and her two Marines in his dust.

"These aren't usually the op orders I get, Commander." Ashley seemed skeptical, then again, who wouldn't be? "I'm more used to mud and battlefields than this."

Human sized targets instead of concepts, arbitrations and accusations, Ashley meant truly. Shepard could do nothing but shake her head in gentle disagreement. "A battle isn't where you are, Chief, it's who you are. Conflict will follows us anywhere and everywhere. Now come, let's go before Anderson notices."

"Might be a bit dangerous, ma'am?" Kaiden had been the steady voice of measured reason for the time Shepard had known him. There always had to be one.

But then again, there always had to be someone like her to teach him better. "We're already in the shits. So why not?"

* * *

It was rather strategic, how they carried on on Tali'Zorah's trail. It was as if Garrus had been a school teacher and he was leading his children in single file. It was odd, yes, but that was the only way Mai would tolerate being this close to a Sangheili without gutting them. Especially one that she had unfinished business with.

Her scar left on his face diagonally marked him as hers.

Garrus led, oddly enough, in the vague direction Usze had said that Tali had gone, as JD stood next to him in pace, Mai behind them all.

"I am not worried by you, Imp. I do not even regard you." The Elite drawled out, barely above a whisper into JD's ears as they walked through the ward. Busy enough for them not to be entirely singled out, but they still drew eyes. The way that the Elites spoke English, JD noticed, it felt mystical, regal almost. That was the natural deepness of his words and the way he formed sentences.

He said nothing in response, tilting his head back to the Elite. By all means, don't worry about me, he communicated. It was the Spartan behind them that he had to regard.

They were in the wards now, in a Lower Marketplace where galactic commerce came to be traded and exchanged. Even armor and weapons surprisingly. To think of military arms being sold to civilians in a large population center! It made JD worry about what exactly law looked like in this world. Stalls had been set up, dozens deep, each selling some sort of different trinket from worlds not even Garrus had known of. Bumping shoulders with the crowd, they only, barely, noticed the upped alerted C-Sec officers doing their beats.

"Have you seen a Quarian? Have you? You? Yeah, Lavender body suit… no? Okay thanks." Even as Garrus moved throughout the crowds in the markets he asked his questions as those three that came with him looked over. Usze had the height, as did Mai, but no Quarian was recognized. Perhaps more dangerously no supposed "C-Sec Officers" as had been chasing her was seen.

Still, despite his proximity to an Covenant warrior of death, JD, oddly, felt at ease. Perhaps Mai had that effect on him and her grating aura around her that threatened to shatter and rip said Elite's throat from his neck, but it was being in the presence of Garrus that was probably the more apparent. He was a cop, and he found family among law enforcement.

"Should clear out." He croaked up to Garrus, the Turian turning around as more and more passerbys ignored him. "Being in the thick of it ain't safe."

Garrus agreed, coaxing the group out and to the left. To the balconies of that marketplace, looking out forward to the arms of the Citadel.

_"Like High Charity." _Those words had left Usze's voice without his permission, as was the awe he had in actually seeing it from that angle: as a city, not as a space station.

All but one of them had taken the time to look out at that sight, on the railing. The one that hadn't had been more focused, laser focused, on the Elite. She would tolerate this only under the condition that he was a second away from death, and that Garrus would not know.

Still it left Usze, JD, and Garrus to look out to the Galactic wonder that had been the Citadel. The blues and steel of the nebula they were in combined with the coldness of space, it was, oddly, soothing. Cold in vision, but not sharp, welcoming that, even that far away from dirt and stone, a home could be made. To JD, it reminded him of home, staring out at a horizon of skyscrapers, dots of lights and people and technology painting everything.

"First time?" Garrus said hurriedly. JD nodded along with Usze. "Yeah. A thousand different cultures and peoples, and it's up to some sorry son of a bitch like me to keep it in order." This town meant something different to Vakarian now. If this looked like home, Garrus sounded like JD's father. Or, perhaps, any cop, beyond his wits desperately fighting a losing battle with modern society with the rule of law, made by men who could not imagine where that society would go.

"How many people call this home, Officer Vakarian?" Usze spoke with regard.

"13 million, give or take the season."

Usze had known that number well. "Our ship holds similar numbers."

Garrus seemed shocked as he did the equivalent of an eyebrow raise. He had known the Solace had been large, but, that large? "Spirits."

JD and Mai had been glad that their helmets had been on. Their faces were in silent shock as they also turned to Usze. For JD, it was a number uncountable. For Mai, there was pride in it. She hoped she took that much of a chunk from them.

Usze nodded reflectively in his helmet. His Carbine had been on his back, no need for it now, even, his sword on his hip. "In many ways, it is like the Quarian ships in their fleet. The Solace was a ship that we had only a dozen of her type, and in it, it carried the Covenant at its whole."

"Quite a lot of people. Were your homeworlds lost to you beforehand?" Garrus asked, still scanning the crowd, turning away from the Citadel's view. Usze continued to look out however.

Sanghelios was lost to them now, and yet not.

"The Covenant was an Empire, befit its size, it is only natural that its greatest ships carried its greatest peoples." With habitat domes, cryostasis pods for the majority, hunting grounds and areas of repose for the permanent crew, any CSO-class ship was a world unto itself, unmatched save for its own kind. In their honeycomb like arrangement, millions upon millions had been safely sheltered away awaiting either the Great Journey or their scheduled living shifts out of cryo in order to avoid muscle atrophy and general long-term cryogenic defects. The CSO was one of the only ships in the Covenant to entertain the idea of living quarters for the crew. For they were warships first, not places of habitat.

For Usze, and all those like him, his true home was the battlefield.

Still, Garrus didn't have a clear idea of the majority of the Solace's population. Those numbers were padded mostly by Grunts and Drones. The Hunters weren't even counted, traditionally, and otherwise the Elites held the majority over the Brute clans presents, several Sangheili houses with a healthy population present. His own brood hadn't been present, but still, he could lose track the number of cousins he had in its complement.

"How many survived?" The first words from Mai, to her enemy. A tactical question.

Usze turned around, chest to chest with her, the backdrop to him a city among the stars, bustling with metal and steel and skycars befit a future that, maybe, maybe, might've looked like the one if they didn't have a great war, a Great Journey, to embark on. It was said, by a classical Human author, that if the stars should appear only one night, every thousand years, men and women would forget what the city of God looked like.

The Citadel had been that city.

"Do not test me, **Demon**."

In another life Mai would've charged and thrown Usze over the ledge, and, further, in another life he would've held onto her and brought them both to their doom.

"Officer Vakarian. Please respond." This was a world where interruptions had been saving graces.

Garrus went to his omni as it rung from C-Sec dispatch. "Go ahead station."

"Officer Barro reports he spotted two unbadged C-Sec officers in these directions." Waypoints popped up on his omni-tool. "We have officers dispatched covering all exits to the markets."

"Roger station." He looked to Mai and Usze, oblivious to their tension. "Come on, let's go." JD would've followed, to move was to avoid all this, but he had been singled out. "Hey, there's a clinic here, run by a Dr. Michel, do you mind checking up and staying with her?"

He had no reason to say no, but he looked to Mai first, and then the Elite that towered over him. Not enough time to speak words, and it wouldn't be right.

His dominant hand went to his chin in a cup, before forming into a fist, thumb out, his remaining hand being palm up flat as his fist went into it, gestured to Usze.

_Take care of him._

The ambiguity of some signs, especially when combined with Spartan Signs, made Mai think. He wanted her to take care of this Elite. But how?

He repeated the sign, his movements speeding up as Garrus was somewhat bewildered, JD's head jerking in a tilt. He needed a response from her. To know that she wasn't going to do something they would both regret.

He got a nod of her head, slow, methodical, but repeated.

A gloved hand went palm flat, almost covering his mouth before motioning down toward her.

_Thank you._

"Where?" Was the single word he allowed to Garrus. JD's omni flashed as he was sent the beacon.

"Thanks." Was all Garrus could say as he went off with Mai and Usze in tow.

Before he himself went off though, he took one last look to the Citadel, to the town below, maybe, just maybe, when he got out whatever service he had with the Alliance…

He didn't think about his future much. That was a luxury he was afforded now, and he didn't ask for much in it. The only thing he had figured would be constant was a woman he worried for then and now.

The only time Mai had taken her eyes off Usze chasing with Vakarian had been now. She hadn't left his side yet and after a few choice moments of peace, JD noticed.

"…?"

Her dominant hand went to motion a cup at her chin before motioning toward him with it. She paused after it, mulling over thoughts in her mind on how, exactly, to say (both in word and in signs):

"_Take care of yourself"_.

* * *

There was no running from C-Sec that close to the Presidium. Not with a circle of C-Sec cops circling the ward as the day by day activities progressed and, eventually, boiled to one of the back-alley corridors that dipped down between markets for maintenance. Or, at least, the entrance of one.

"C-Sec! Hands where I can see them!" Garrus had rounded the corner and faced two supposed C-Sec officers and a door leading further down into the Corridor. His gun had been out facing their back.

"Woah, woah there officer, same side-" One human tried to turn, arms raised.

"Oh you don't fool me, there's only a dozen human C-Sec officers and none of them are blacks."

Perhaps the subtleties of human discrimination hadn't been properly explained by the translators to Garrus's Turian tongue, but there were indeed no blacks on the C-Sec roster. Humans were hardly trusted to matters of Citadel security, let alone Spectrehood. But that was no matter now as the passive and almost easing faces of those two C-Sec officers turned sour.

"What you gonna believe this- this…? Split-mouth alien over me officer?"

Close enough for Mai to do a double take as she approached the men. Split-jaw was the term for the cockier Marines to use, but it was no matter: they had no word for her as she approached them. No amount of gunfire they could put up would be able to stop her. Objects were larger when viewed up close. It only meant that when Garrus locked the door behind them. By the time they both went for their guns Mai had her hands around both of their necks, backs slammed against the door.

Man handling the Turian had been interesting as their two bodies rose higher and higher, backs against the steel and glass of a door that did not give way.

Usze crossed his arms expectantly, coming next to Garrus as the man holstered his pistol. "Are these the two?" The C-Sec officer asked. Usze nodded. To see Spartans handling peoples other than Covenant was a pleasure, he secretly admitted. "Impersonating C-Sec officers is a rather harsh offense, gentlemen. What's up?"

"I like the free snacks from vendors- ack!" The Turian grunted out as Mai squeezed his throat harder, feet still off the ground. They both were struggling to breath and Mai had hardly broke a sweat as she turned, dropping them on the floor and on their ass.

"What are you doing?" Mai ground out as they looked up at her, ready to take her boot and put their faces into steel.

"Jesus Christ it's a woman."

Usze was amused by the comment, enough to see Mai flick a glance at him.

"You were chasing a Quarian, our friend here says, and unless you tell me why I'm gonna have my friend here beat you into a pulp, because, far as I know, his people haven't signed any of the Citadel treaties. He doesn't know any better."

Intimidating welp had been far below Usze, but, just once, on this day of days where he was forced to work with a Demon, he could. He moved closer to them, groin almost in their faces and then actually as his plates forced them against the steel wall. Hands at his hips, the Turian got the most grotesque treatment, his head unable to even look up at Usze as the human was trapped against thigh and wall. In a snap, his right leg went up and down, the sound of his boot against steel unkind, like a crack.

"What're you gonna do, huh?" The Turian grated, his jaw rubbing against the very masculinity of the Elite.

It wasn't stoicness in Usze's voice. It was a promise. "I have seen humans die in as many ways as there are stars in this galaxy. I will be more than willing to use you to understand which of those work with your species." His two main claws had reached down to hold the cheek of the Turian, before gracing their own mandibles. How odd, they felt, and how easy, how easy-

"_RwaaaAA-!"_

How easy it was for him to pull away from his face. Like tearing human teeth, it looked like to Mai. The human imposter was not neglected, not as Usze's hoof had found the man's leg and pressed down. The agony that erupted was not kind, but to the Demon, it was familiar to her.

Garrus had been quick to not let it go on too long, going to Usze's shoulder and squeezing as the Elite relented and stepped back.

Good cop, bad cop. Garrus kneeled down, his piercing eyes cutting through any thought that he wouldn't keep the words that came out of his mouth. "I can leave this alleyway for five minutes, or you can walk out of here into safe custody, depending on whether or not you tell us what you know about the Quarian and why you're tailing her."

_"Officer Vakarian, please update-"_ The comm connection to C-Sec headquarters was cut, and it only helped his point. If Spectres could play gray, so could he. And he had a feeling that maybe, maybe, one was involved.

The Turian was barely coherent as some of his Mandible seemed dislocated, loose, the man, even as he cramped his leg with the imprint of a Sangheili boot on it, answered back. "Oh fuck you, bird brain, you ain't getting nothing out of-"

It was Mai's turn. She had made people talk before as she approached like a whisper. For being so big she knew how to control her gait into silence, pulling Garrus asides as in one motion, balled her fist.

The metal of the Citadel had all been sourced from whatever the Mass Relays had been, but, regardless, there had been lesser grades of it that the unseen workers of the Citadel had used to build up shops and buildings. The Keepers knew something was up when a clanging metal sound rang through the markets, and they had proceeded at such a pace that was so unlike them when they came to that alley where the trio had found the C-Sec officers.

With enough momentum, at the right angle, Mai could flip Scorpions and Warthogs.

Here: she could punch right through the wall, right next to the man's head: coaxing silence from all as she gave him enough time to look at what she had done. It was barely a second after that she had flattened out her palm, almost as if into a point, and put it right center of the man's chest, aiming.

No threatening, no pretenses, not a word from her. Just the sudden balling of her first followed by the shrieking gasp of the man who had thought, for a second that went on for too long in his mind, that this steel abomination of a woman was about to punch through his heart.

She pulled her fist back and at the end of his shriek. "_Okay okay!"_

She went through with the punch, but Spartan Time kicked in, pulling her fist back but still throwing it, just barely, barely, touching his chest like a kiss from the wind. That fist only went to his neck though, grabbing it again and throwing him to the other side of the alley.

The man crumpled in his form as Usze stood over the Turian, Garrus and Mai dealing with the man. In his lungs though, Garrus felt the first punch too. Almost as if he had been the one who was hit; anyone with that kind of strength was stronger than a Krogan!

A pair of Keepers, insectoid, had gone through the alley uncaring of what was happening in it. To both Mai and Usze, the Drones of the Covenant came to mind, but thought nothing of them back as they looked into the hole Mai had made expressionless from their blackened eyes.

"Next words out of your mouth better help us out, or those Keepers will have to be mopping up blood." Garrus kneeled down next to him, spitting almost. Mai, vaguely, wondered if JD would've said anything about this type of law enforcement, but again, these weren't common crooks. They were special: their purpose was far more insidious than fraud.

With the breath in his lungs, thankful that he still had lungs, he only sputtered out: "Someone hired Fist to hire us, some plausible deniability bullshit if I ever seen it. Wanted us to nab the Quarian, but if we couldn't, keep tabs on her for some of Fist's men to ambush her."

"Who hired Fist?"

"We don't know!"

Garrus seemed a bit disappointed, but this kind of police work was never easy. "Where is she then?"

The man weakly thumbed to the doors at the end of the alley. "Just doing some preplanning, locked up those doors so she had no way out."

"She in there now?"

The man shook his head, hurt. "Nah. She thinks she's meeting the Shadow Broker in a bit there after we ran her off."

The sound of a leg against a Turian's stomach had resounded as Usze had given the Turian another kick to keep him down. Beating thugs in an alleyway wasn't something the two outsiders thought they'd do, but here they were.

Garrus nodded within himself as he took in this info. "Well, can't use C-Sec to contact her. She'll probably abandon plans and lose her again." He looked up to Mai to confirm his thoughts, but she had no input to give. "So I think our best bet might be just to wait here and get that door unlocked. When whatever meeting happens we jump in and get her."

"Can you get through those doors?" Mai tipped her head at them.

"Yeah. But we'll have to stay behind it to hide unfortunately, going the long way around might tip out any spotters." Garrus's hands went to his belt, two cuffs coming out. "You have the right to remain silent under the Citadel Common Law as established by the Council. Anything you say can and will be used against you underneath a criminal trial." Garrus had read the two thugs their rights as Usze dragged the Turian over for him to be cuffed, Garrus turning back on his comms to HQ, alerting them of two perps.

"Do I have to remain here?" The growling words of Usze had made Garrus look at him, off of his comms.

He considered for a moment. "We need you to confirm the Quarian is this Tali'Zorah."

He didn't seem to pleased with his answer as far as his body language went, his helmet-clad head shifting over to Mai. "So be it."

For the first time, Garrus had given his two party members a once over. Their armor hadn't been like anything he'd ever seen and he'd be remised if he didn't ask something of them. "Any tricks in that gear of yours?"

His eyes didn't play tricks on them when, at the same time, the two of them had gone invisible.

Mai had been a test bed for many MJOLNIR projects. The direct integration of a Sangheili active camo module had been one of them. One that surprised Usze greatly as, seconds later, they decloaked.

"Heretic." Scornfully left his mouth, quiet enough for Garrus not to har, but Mai to. To use their own technology against them was nothing but heretical.

Garrus had spoke to himself too, but aloud. "I guess you see something new every day Garrus…" Before he forgot however, he rung up someone else. "Commander Shepard, say status?"

Gunfire erupted on the other line. "_**Busy**_."

Before the C-Sec officer could look up Mai was gone, off to find Shepard.

* * *

No one wanted to stop an over seven-foot-tall, armored woman who looked like she had somewhere to be, so Mai had gotten to the waypoint denoting Shepard's location faster than she would admit. Bumping shoulders with the blur of alien population had been a stressful experience, but she kept her goals at the front of her mind.

Normally the Alliance software for finding squadmates on their omni-tool had been less than accurate, but she followed the sound of gunfire and that worked well enough.

The Shadow Broker Mai had never heard of, but Shepard had been more familiar as she hung on the corner of the door's frame and held her angle with her assault rifle, the body of the bar tender bleeding out on the floor as the rest of the bar's would be workers had picked up a gun and, she just had the hunch, awaited her arrival with gunfire.

For all the mystery behind the Shadow Broker, their name had been rather self-explanatory. In a place where lips were loose and so were most sexual escapes, Fist had been a rather noted contact and employee of them that made sense for the Shadow Broker to employ.

Shepard could guess though, with what little she knew of Fist and the fact he had been employed by the Broker, that enough shit came down the line that Fist sought to go out on his own.

A gunshot grazed the doorway on the end Ashley was holding down, she backing off and away as she prepped another grenade.

"Don't." Shepard warned her. "Might be civilians in there still."

She put the explosive disc away only to let another suppressive burst through, obviously not hitting anything. "Not like we're making any progress Shepard!"

Running out of ammo hadn't been an issue since Mass Effect based weaponry came to light, at least, as far as basic arms went. To wait it out on ammo alone hadn't been a prospect that anyone was willing to entertain.

"We need people in that bar, now!" Any cover Shepard could've pulled toward her with her biotics was too far away or too large, and any back entrance would've split up her already meek fireteam already.

She'd call C-Sec, but the saying went when crooks were at your door the police were minutes and miles away.

She got something better than C-Sec however as the now familiar shadow that had been Chief Gul approached her from the walkway to the rear.

"Ma'am." Mai answered calmly, taking a kneel and relieving Shepard of the angle she was holding.

"I thought you were with Officer Vakarian, Chief Gul." Shepard asked, readjusting the stock on her rifle.

"The safety of Alliance personnel takes paramount." Her tone was dull, to the point.

Shepard shook her head once. "Fair enough."

"What's the situation?"

"Dozen contacts according to motion sensors? Most human, one Krogan. Maybe civilians in the mix.

Mai did the tactical planning in her mind. This situation wasn't anything she hadn't done before.

"Permission to move in, Commander?"

"What?!" Shepard looked at Mai as if she was crazy.

Perhaps Mai was, but not incapable.

"Not the first establishment I've had to take down."

Seeing was believing with Mai, and her tone did not betray her. Her confidence sounded like an eagle, trying to convince her that could fly. It was foolish to doubt.

"Fuck, okay then. Krogan's on rear position while we've got people behind all the overturned tables. Few shooters on top of the island in the center of the bar. Past that, nothing. We'll come in on my go."

With one nod, Mai affirmed, handing off her rifle to Shepard as, for the first time, Shepard saw the capabilities of the MJOLNIR armor system truly in action. She had turned invisible, and Kaiden and Williams had stopped holding their angles to check their eyes, unbelieving that Mai had disappeared. Active camouflage tech was still in its infancy they thought.

Mai existed, quieter than a shadow, light itself coming through her as the bare shimmer of light that belied her presence disappeared from behind Shepard and went into Chora's Den. This wasn't her first bar fight. This would be, however, judging by who had filled out this bar, her first kills of these people. No idea who she was fighting, no idea where she was, but she knew she could kill as silently, she rounded the covers and tables, accounting for fighters and fighting positions. Men had aimed their rifles at the doors, sweat beading down their foreheads if they were human. Asari dancers had picked up the gun and held down the same angles, threatening to take down Shepard if she poked her head. They knew why she was there. An Alliance soldier with the gait she had, walking toward them, even when the bar was closed… Fist knew what was to come.

He didn't anticipate who would be there however. Not as the Krogan bouncer, arms confidently crossed against each other had led the defense, barking out his orders, his taunts. Seeing a Krogan this close, she didn't make any note of them. Smaller than a Hunter, about the same as Brute. Probably stronger. She knew what to do though, and whatever whiff of her that the Krogan got as he sniffed the air and saw the shimmer in front of him, it had been too late as a shape of a woman, cloaked in armor, manifested in front of him.

When Hell broke loose, it came with the breaking of bone.

The way the skull of a living being caves is like glass. Not at all, and then all at once. A fact that Shepard and the rest of them there had to observe as Mai had kicked the Krogan's leg inward, making them fall onto their back and be victim to her boot and every single pound of force behind it. The beat of the continuing dingy music had done nothing to hide that sound, that awful sound, of the Krogan's face being caved inward into its neck, into its body, as in one fell swoop one ton of force was pushed through its head. Not a fight was able to be given. Not with her, doing the deed.

It would've been a cruelty if it took longer than a second, but that was how fast her boot went through its body turning it inside out almost. She was a force of nature, her lower body sprayed with the brownish green blood of an alien.

Without even waiting for the screams of the Krogan's windpipes to pass she had stepped out, going to the overhead above the bar where two gunmen had been set up, only with her weight break it, sending the entire affair down in steel and glass into her arms, only to be thrown against the wall. The sound of one human's back breaking had been cut out by a pistol shot from her into the other's skull, she turning back around to the slope she had just made and climbing it, peering over the top to the other side of the room where their cover would do them no good from above.

Any who tried to draw bead on her on top of that fallen structure were unable to follow up, not as she jumped down, her armor and shields bouncing off any fire, only to land next to one of the guards and force him against the overturned table with her first. His skull had already been broken by the punch. His spine came next as she had kicked the table through him, sending it flying to the other end of the den just above Shepard and the team as they began to press in, Mai providing more than just an ample distraction.

Watching her, it had been like seeing a metal storm rip through the living.

She did it silently, without a breath, and in turn she stunned the rest of the team into silence as the gunfire stopped after all the screaming and breaking.

Under her breath, Shepard could do nothing but see something she couldn't recognize as human as she remerged from behind the circular bar, dragging a man, bloodied and barely alive, by his neck, desperately trying to keep his hands up. He was pacified, but not before Mai had gotten to him.

It was like seeing the Grim Reaper walk toward them: Mai, dragging a body that left broken glass and blood in its wake across the floor. She threw him at his feet. "Tie him up." She said.

"He looks better off dead!" Kaiden could hardly believe he just said that, but he did, part of man's shoulder exposed, his neck bent, every breath seeming like he was sucking in blood. That was what did him in as his body crumpled on the floor. No time to think however.

"Move!" Shepard signaled with her hands, coming into Mai's wake as she existed a breath's length from the enemy. All those that came outside? Cut down from Shepard and her team, passing over bodies as gunshots from Marines who were trained for this made short work of any thugs there. The way men and women were cut down, regardless of species, was something everyone there had been well-acquainted with. No two-bit thug had a chance as Shepard rush up front, not wanting to fall behind Mai, the Spartan funneling resistance down the back halls of the bar toward locked doors that would not open.

"Gul!" To hear her last name shouted was a new sensation to her, emptying her pistol's thermal capacity as it burned in her hand. She twisted around, only to see her rifle fly at her from Shepard's grip, she cradling it into an aim at the remaining resistance.

Shepard could vaguely imagine what shitshow this would be, paperwork wise, but she went for broke on Garrus's lead, and when people shot at her, she tended to not take too kindly to it.

"Let us in dammit! Let us in!"

The gunmen had pounded on the door leading to the private areas of the club, but no give.

"Guns on the ground, hands up!" Shepard had taken command and Mai had put on the brakes as they stood in that hallway, guns aimed at the perps. The rag tag group had twitched toward them with no intention at all, shotguns and pistols moved to aim up.

They didn't get that far as the shooting gallery began in blasting burst that didn't last more than five seconds.

Kaiden had damned them for making him do that as the last gunman fell to his knees, dead, joining the rest in that hallway and all those that came before him. "God dammit."

"They made their choice." Williams had been more than willing to answer as Shepard furrowed her brow, a bark coming out of her. Not an order, or even a word, but it was just her very being needing to make a noise. Like a wild dog she air came out of her mouth like a bark, only to turn into a snarl.

"Go." Was the word she finally said, two fingers forward to the door they were trying to get into."

Stepping over bodies Mai had been on point, only to encounter the problem these gunmen had. "Locked." The Spartan said in observance.

"Can we get through?" Shepard motioned to Kaiden for omni-gel or breaching charges.

Mai had a simpler idea as her hands glided over the glass, feeling for pressure, or rather, a lack thereof. Doors were easy, especially those that slid open from recessed places. The easiest places to break had been their lips as she found them. It was trivial when half of it was glass.

She had forgotten when she had become familiar with her strength. Maybe she never had been, and instead it was injected into her as consequence of being a CAT-II Spartan-III, but that far into her life she was blunt with herself about what exactly she could do when her fist needed to be balled or her legs needed to kick either a door in or someone's lights out.

Like lightning she drew her leg up, and when she pressed out the door hadn't been there anymore, broken and twisted and giving a hole for her to again, take her arms, and shear the remaining pieces off.

"Jesus Christ." She hadn't been, but Williams felt compelled to say His name as Mai ripped her way through metal with her bare hands. Shepard could at least do the nice thing and hold up who had been on the otherside, locking them out.

"S-stop right there!" Seeing a woman tear through a door stammered them. "Don't come any closer."

The rest of the team had them pegged the second they saw how shakily they held their guns. On the other side of the door:

"Warehouse workers." Kaiden had said, quickly holstering his own weapon. "All the real guards must be dead."

The last of the door had been torn asides and they entered the back warehouse of Chora's Den, at gun point between two male humans in utility outfits. Not the sort they just blew through with hardly a wasted breath. Quietly, Shepard considered, looking at Mai's handiwork, if she had a division of men and women like her, humanity's problems in the galaxy might've been over very quickly.

"Stay back or we'll shoot!" Shepard holstered her own weapon, but still approached the men.

"We just merc'd the entire bar just to get here, do you really think this is the type of job environment you want?" Shepard had put on that voice. Her confident voice, the one she used when she wanted to put on that image of hero. Cocksure, but charming. With an eyebrow raised the point hit the two men rather hard.

"I mean- Well, Fist don't pay us well enough to deal with…" One of the men's words trailed off.

"Find a new job while you can." Shepard advised.

"Yeah, you're probably right." Pistols dropped to the floor as the two men scattered out behind them.

Mai had been intrigued. Been a long time since she'd seen someone talked out of their own death. Her ONI handlers often tried to if they were less experienced with the Insurrection. They often ended up dead and she often had to clean up after them. She supposed two men in the wrong place wouldn't be an egregious oversight. It wasn't up to her anyway.

"You do have a way with words, Commander." Ashley was impressed. "Wished that worked with the Council."

Kaiden had remarked, turning around and holding down the door frame behind them making sure no one came up on their six. "Well, unlike the Council the Commander has an option of shooting them."

Shepard rolled her head in some agreement. She didn't wear her helmet on shore here, so her red hair had still been, somehow, in its bun. "Williams, Alenko, hold down this angle out. Me and Gul will go say hi to Fist."

"Aye ma'am."

"Roger."

"Gul with me." Shepard tapped the larger woman's shoulder. "Need him alive, so none of what I just saw, aight?"

"Yes ma'am." Gul knew how to follow orders. She was good at it.

"Tell me, someone like you who can do all those things," Shepard found another door in the warehouse, clearly marked to Fist's office. Mai had tipped her head at her commander to apply pressure again but Shepard had shaken her head as she kneeled before its control panel and took a tube of omni-gel out of her kit. "How do I not hear of you?"

Mai had taken the seconds Shepard was tinkering with the control panel to choose her words. "Classified, ma'am."

"Ain't what I'm asking Chief Gul." She was good with circuitry. Hacking doors and locks had been cleaner than charges and Masterkeys, and cleanliness was next to godliness. On her more thoughtful leaves, she did attend church. Church, Temple, Mosques, whatever. She was world weary and yet world wanting at the same time. "I'm asking why I ain't heard a whiff of you from anyone."

She knew something. That much Mai could tell, but she had nothing to say. "Alliance spooks must be doing their jobs."

Shepard had taken point the second the door had opened, not even caring Mai had been there, a door beyond that being opened as Fist's office was approached. It was an odd arrangement, but the office was repurposed from some byway storage, the shadow of a man casting by light on the wall opposite of Shepard and Mai had let them raise their guns. "Fist! We need to talk!"

Shepard had taken cover before the opening of his office, peering in to see only a man thumbing the safety off his pistol, in full armor already. Square head, a good enough target if it came to it.

"God dammit, do I have to do everything myself around here!" The owner of Chora's Den was about who anyone expected him to be: a man with two rapid fire turrets popping out of cabinets. Maybe overkill for gang warfare, but for two Special Operators, it had been trivial as Mai dashed the space between cover and planted herself opposite of Shepard, a burst of gunfire in Mai's wake missing.

"Turrets." Shepard said once, the blue flame in her hands denoting abilities beyond Mai's understanding forming. Ever since Mai had been manhandled by Kaiden with Biotics, she had kept it in the back of her mind like a scratch. She needed to know how to fight Biotics if it came down to it, but to have one on her side, it gave her time to observe as Shepard holstered her rifle, only to take a knee and momentarily expose herself, both hands reaching out to the turrets. WIth one hand each, extending an invisible grasp, it had been like she reached out and grabbed both turrets by their necks and held them up. "Mai!"

"I don't think-! AARG-"

Fist had tried to pop up behind his desk, using it as cover, to put a round into Shepard. She was open and vulnerable doing what she was doing, but she had Mai. Her Kinetic Barrier would've tanked a few hit, but Mai didn't chance it, snapping out of cover and putting one slug into Fist's own shield. The force of it surprised him, putting him on his ass as Mai snapped her aim to the two turrets, pumping a dozen rounds into each of them as fast as her trigger finger would allow.

She did not treat these new guns kind, it visibly smoking as the turrets broke apart and blew apart, deemed no factor as she let the rifle fall onto her sling and aimed, one handed, with her pistol toward the fallen Fist.

Shepard took in a breath, letting her biotics go, reshouldering her rifle as they approached the bar owner. "You make one move and it'll be your last punk."

One-liners. Mai had known what they were. For background noise during their more involved readings, JD had put on any number of action movies to catch up on Alliance culture and history. At least this humanity still prescribed to the archetypes of baddasses and heroes, bloody justice and awesome power by gun. It seemed trivial to her, when she did watch those films in their hotel room, but she saw, once, that there had been a film made by the UNSC that had a Spartan as a main character. It was running at one of the theaters that one of the larger ships she had been posted on and had caught some scenes of it during her jogging rounds. The Spartan had been one to drop such one-liners as Shepard did right now.

She had to wonder, approaching a man on his back and liable to be killed by them any second, what version of Shepard she was to know. The one crafted by her government? The one she owed to herself? Or the one molded by battle?

Maybe the sum of them all had been who she was, truly, but here, as she kicked away the man's pistol, a dark look in her eyes, this Shepard had been the one that the Council needed.

Fist's cut had given him flat hair to go along with his flat jaw, scars on his face from bottles smashed across his face likely. He looked unimpressive.

"Wait don't kill me! I surrender."

Surrender. A word foreign to Mai.

Insurrectionist at least had the balls to fight her to death, and the Covenant had no such word in their dictionary.

"You treat all your guests like this?! We were just here a few hours ago and now this?!" Shepard had yelled down at the man. "What's your deal Fist?!"

"When a group of Alliance Marines, fresh from talking to that damn Turian cop, come running straight for me, what do you think?!" He yelled back, avoiding looking at her.

"That he has something to hide." Shepard called his bluff. "You know anything about this Quarian?" He had to.

"What you talking about the kid? The one asking about the Shadow Broker?"

"Who else?!" Shepard's voice rose along with Fist as Shepard dragged him up with strength that made Mai raise her eyebrow.

"Okay okay!" Being held up by a woman who could kill him often shrunk a man. Let alone a man who sent thugs to try and kill them. Mai's presence didn't help.

"She came to me this morning! Wanted to talk to the Shadow Broker, but I told the damn suit rat, the Shadow Broker talks to no one." In his cowering tones he told the truth, but still it wasn't enough.

"You and me both know that the Shadow Broker works through agents, you one of them?!" Shepard spit on his face through her teeth.

"No! No! But she didn't know that!"

She leaned in to him more. "Who were those men chasing her then, yours?"

"Yeah, if she had information to give to the Shadow Broker, someone didn't want it given."

"Who?!" The golden question.

"_**Saren Arterius."**_

* * *

Leaving Fist cuffed and escorted with Ashley and Kaiden to the Embassies had been the only logical course of action: the man verifying Saren was involved in, at the very least, conspiracy to murder a Quarian for information pertinent to Eden Prime. Shepard would've felt vindication if she hadn't been running with Mai, again, into the wards after blasting a few of the rear-guard Thugs that showed up late to the bar.

"Roger that Shepard, we've got the rear covered, and waiting for the meeting to take place."

_"Copy all, Vakarian, we're running to you now."_

Courtesy of C-Sec, Garrus had a few tricks up his sleeve. He was a cop after all on the Citadel, a fiber optic wire with a camera slid through the door and out the other side. A Turian and a few armored up Salarians had been waiting, patiently, having arrived a few minutes ago. The rest of C-Sec presence had been called off, and the two perps from before hauled away. All that was left was to wait.

"Sangheili, right?" Small talk was the best Garrus could offer as his duty pistol awaited in his hand.

Usze had been, oddly to Garrus, at ease, his rifle not even off his back. Usze nodded, observing the hilt in his hand that denoted him surely as an Elite.

"You a soldier?"

It was natural that the Turian asked that. Every Turian at some point had been. Usze nodded again. "A warrior."

Garrus clicked his mandibles at Usze, also looking at the Sangheili's own. "Been a part of ambushes before?" Another nod. "You take point then after I yell out the warning, you seem to be more comfortable."

Youth. Usze smelled youth on Garrus Vakarian. Like a kit who had not seen battle before, or known the thrill of a hunt, the hunger that it brewed within the uninitiated to be followed, upon success, the greatest high. He did not know what a battlefield looked like and he wanted to, so badly.

"Very well."

That's when she appeared, just as Usze remembered her, staring over Garrus's shoulder at his omni-screen. She seemed like such a delicate creature to him, in the color of dying flowers on his homeworld. Her voice was high and sweet, a rascal perhaps if he were to use un-regal language. She seemed human in many ways, but so had many others in that galaxy. She was alien in the sense that she did not fear the sight of an Elite such as he.

She came down the stairs of that alley way, the Salarians taking cover as the Turian in a traveler's garb had walked out to meet her in that dimly red-lit hallway of stygian disposition.

Utility belts had been over her suit, the helmet that had been her mask hiding her face save for glowing eyes that reminded Usze of the Engineers bio-luminesce. He wondered if, in Sanghelios's past, those eyes had been common in those ancestors that they had shared supposedly. It was a flip of a coin, after all, a matter of coincidences and butterfly effects, that had made them rulers of their planet as opposed to the other.

"Gun." Garrus pointed out on the Quarian, hanging at her hip loosely by a holster that didn't fit.

The Turian approached her. "Did you bring it?" She stopped a comfortable distance away from him at the bottom of the stairs but the Turian didn't care, moving forward, a hand out and gracing the silk of her hood before, more crassly, pressuring through her suit to glide over her form invasively.

"Where's the Shadow Broker, where's Fist?'

"They'll be here. Where's the evidence?"

She slapped his hand away with a smack. She knew better. The last few days had matured her more than any Pilgrimage had any right to.

The Turian had his fun, there really was no need to even entertain her with what he was there to do, looking his shoulder, a hand signal motioning for the hidden Salarians behind her, emerging from crates.

Go-time, Shepard not there.

The door on Usze's and Garrus's side had been thrown open, and Usze had disappeared in plain sight as he rolled forward ahead of Garrus, cloaked in active camouflage.

"C-Sec! Nobody move you're all under arrest!" Garrus yelled out hoarsely, pistol out.

In the dark light and in the sudden appearance of Garrus, no one had seen the Quarian go for her belt, for both her gun and a cylindrical object, only for that object to be thrown at Garrus. Perhaps it wasn't the best idea to be revealed as C-Sec when officers had been chasing her earlier: the hastily made concussion grenade going off behind Garrus in a botched throw as the Quarian, with one hand shot rounds in the direction of the Turian that had her.

He had shields, bouncing off but forcing him into cover as she dove for it herself. She wasn't a Marine of her Flotilla, only, when tossing herself, smacking her head against the crate of cover.

It dazed her enough as she rolled over to a sit, cradling her stolen pistol close to herself as she saw double vision. Double a Salarian that came over and had their own guns pointed at her. She didn't have time to say a prayer, only to be silent as the sounds of an unfamiliar weapon activating made the cacophony of gunfire and grenades go mute.

Garrus had gotten off his ass, the ringing in his ear subsiding as he saw something that only the most gruesome of murders had shown: a Salarian getting cut in two in one swipe.

Usze's Energy Sword had been recovered from Altis and the island that he had fought the Demon from, its hilt scuffed and damaged from her knife, but still, distinctly, his. It had tasted blood a hundred times over and he christened it in this galaxy here as the red lighting above hid the blood that came from the horizontal slice he bisected the Salarian with.

The Turian hitman had his training take over, charging Usze as he stood there, over two halves of a Salarian and a dazed Quarian, disappearing as the Turian saw nothing and felt nothing but air, trying to dive onto Usze.

When he looked up from the ground all he saw had been two women. One bigger than the other, both guns aimed at him. Saren would kill him, so he'd rather go out like-

He raised his pistol at them, trying to scoot on his back, but a bullet from Shepard broke first through his shields, than his head, the wet slam on the floor sobering Tali as she tried to post up on cover. "Stay down!" She was yelled at however by Commander Shepard herself, the woman taking herself upon the Quarian to hold her shoulders behind cover.

The remaining Salarian had opened fire at Mai as she pressed forward, her gunfire forcing them into cover. For what big eyes a Salarian had however, they could never have seen Usze appear behind his back. He only saw the bright blue tips of the sword burn through his chest.

The way an Energy Sword burned through someone, it was a burn that represented hunger. The weapon demanded blood, and, for now, it sucked it through the heart of the Salarian as their life went with it, Usze taking his hand and taking the being off of his blade as if a piece of a kebab.

When the body crumpled on the floor it was the only thing between him and a Demon that never stopped pushing up to that crate the Salarian used as cover. Her gun had been aimed at him, right between his eyes. If this was another world he knew what would've happened. He might've been able to fight, to avoid death, but here, now, it wasn't clear. All he knew was a Demon down the barrel and she had every right to fire.

"Do you really want to _**finish this fight**_, Demon?"

That was what she always did. But here, now? Spartans killed Elites, that's how it would always be, she imagined, knew almost as fact in her bones.

"Do you want to kill me?" She spoke to him, gun not moving an inch as Garrus found his bearings and moved past them,e unaware of what had been transpiring. He was busier with the fact that the person they were trying to save had thrown a grenade at him.

**"Yes."**

Sangheili spoke nothing but truths, as true as the sharpness in their blades and the fire in their hearts for battle. His sword burned the very air around it as Mai took a glance down at it. How many had been dead on it? The blood from the Salarian burned on its energy and, in the back of her mind, she wondered it was like to be killed by one.

For the first time in her life however, she asked this for an answer, not from the propaganda, or from the common, basic thought that came with fighting unknowable aliens.

**"Why?" **She asked him. Him.

Usze's eyes burned through her through his helmet, and she likewise did the same back. Elites killed Demons, that's what they did. But that wasn't a why. On the battlefield it was an easy answer: it was either them or him, but here, in a different world, they were given the displeasure of having to answer that question each unto themselves.

Mai wasn't asking for him, Mai was asking for herself. She wanted to know an answer she could give to.

New blood, new battles, and yet, despite that, there was a conflict in every soldier's heart. Between the rational and the irrational. Between good and evil. Sometimes the lines were blurred and the greyness of life's morality and consequentiality fell apart. Sometimes it led to two soldiers, out of the war they had fought all their lives, meeting in the back alley again, a universe apart.

"I am not here **For. You. Demon**." To hear an Elite speak, it did something deadly to Mai. It made them human.

Demon. That word hung in the air. It burned her ears to hear herself called that. It meant history. History that she couldn't have. She did not create that name. Only Inherited it. Reclaimed it.

_**"Get away from me you Bosh'tet!" **_It was the Quarian. Tearing herself from Shepard's calming grasp she held her pistol again, at Garrus. **"I'm not talking to anyone except for the Council! This is all a set up!"**

Garrus had his hands up though, the ringing in his ear faintly there as he felt the tell-tale buzz of a concussion in the back of his skull. "Hey, we're here to help you!"

She held her pistol like an amateur, cupping the grip as she backed away from all of them, Shepard too.

"I have been through too much, and killed too many people to believe a word out of any of your mouths." She was scared.

In all of the galaxy, there were some things that were never supposed to happen to people. But for this Quarian? She had witnessed her friend burn alive in a trap, chased by another one of Saren's assassins, all because she had wanted to do her Flotilla proud. The story of how she got to where she was, starting her Pilgrimage on Illium, was a tale unto itself, but how it ended now made sense. She was hungry, injured, tired, and facing the oddest assortment of "saviors" she had seen yet. No one had wanted to help her coming to the Citadel, and so, surely no one would help her now.

"I'm with the Alliance, my name is Commander Shepard and-"

"Shut up!" Tali pointed her pistol at Shepard and she tensed. Mai had beat back the instinct to put a round through the Quarian, but Usze had a better idea. Only one of them there had talked to her before.

"What is your name, again, young one." Usze wasn't old himself but he was older because of where he had been now; because of the Solace and the Demon besides him, who only put down her own guard when he sheathed his sword.

The Quarian recognized his voice. If he had gone through the trouble of murdering and tracking her down, then perhaps things were looking up. "You know it." She answered back however, inching back, liable to run away at any second.

"You were annoying."

"You didn't listen to me."

"We're listening now."

"Hey, are you hurt?" Shepard had insisted, looking at the girl, seeing no obvious injuries. She still wanted to hear it from her.

"I know how to look after myself." The gun hadn't been lowered, she saying it through her teeth. The blood from the Salarian that had been cut in half had been staining the feet of the four responders and they moved away from the pool, leaving bloody footprints behind. "Who are you?!"

"I'm Commander Shepard with the Alliance." Shepard was finally able to say. "And these are just some friends. I'm looking for evidence that Saren interfered with a mission Eden Prime."

"Liar! How would you know that?!"

"Because I was there." Shepard had stepped forward and Tali immediately took a step back. "He was on a Human colony when it was attacked, an no one knows why. Please, help us."

Garrus stepped forward. "I'm an actual cop, I promise. Badge 2112. Call C-Sec they'll verify."

"Not good enough, you just want me to call C-Sec on myself."

Mai had nothing to interject. If she had her way she would've rushed the Quarian and take her by the neck until they proved they were safe.

Usze had a better option though. "Your name is **Tali'Zorah Nar Rayya.**"

To hear her name calmed Tali. The panting she was doing only now realized by her as she took in a swallow of her own spit. "So you do remember the annoying suit rat, huh?"

Usze shook his head. "You're a Quarian. I have not been among these people long, but I see why you would harbor some… judgement of them."

"And you know why I'm pointing a gun at you now, right?" Usze nodded once.

"But I hope you understand that, in me leading them to you, I was ordered by my Hierarch to help them secure you. You shall be safe with them." Mai would never admit, but she was enthralled. This was the most she had ever seen an Elite talked, and the way the translators worked, he spoke like a wise mystic: a product of his culture.

"How do you know that?" Tali was skeptical, but Usze only gestured to the monster woman besides him.

"I have not died yet with them, and I pose far more of a threat to them than them to you."

It was certainly something to say. Shepard noticed at least.

"How can I trust you then?!"

Shepard had only gestured at the dead before them. It was a good point that even Tali conceded. Though Usze had to try something else. It was only right.

"I swear the Homeworld on it." Usze looked her dead in the eye. "Our Homeworld."

Maybe it was a little opportunisitic, maybe manipulative, but Usze would stand by that bet. He put his word as a Sangheili enough and, for Tali, it was enough as she broke the aim and let the pistol fall to her feet.

With a whimper: "It's been a long day."

Nothing to the Quarians had been more important than the Homeworld. Rannoch was their God, their Goal, their reason for existing. To hear it spoken from someone who knew it better than she, it spoke to her as a Quarian, perhaps her better judgement.

Shepard approached her first, "I bet… You wanted to go to the Embassy, right?"

Tali looked up, head in hands as best she could. "Yes. Yes please. I have to get there. To get someplace safe."

Shepard patted her shoulder reassuringly. "Of course."

Garrus had finally approached, leaving Mai and Usze saying nothing as the Elite simply nodded in concert with Shepard's agreement. In it, the Demon and the Elite had been bypassing the question, the idea, of peace between them. If they were to fight, it wouldn't be here. Not on their missions from their commanders. They reappeared within the whole group of them as, eventually, as if she was reaching through her hood, the Quarian looked up at the shadows cast before her when Mai approached.

"_Keelah._ I didn't think you humans got so big."

"Yeah, I didn't think so either, but here we are." Garrus meekly gestured to Mai. "You sure you okay? Pretty ballsy throwing grenades indoors."

Garrus had offered her a hand, but she wove off, strong enough. "I'm fine… also, uh, sorry." She offered awkwardly back.

The C-Sec officer had sucked in his cheeks as he backed off. "Well who am I to keep you down?" Like a heartbeat that drove her mad, she rose to the occasion. "How old are you?" he asked.

"Just turned 22." Young women thrown into circumstances bigger than them. That was the story of the Normandy crew it seemed. The Quarian thumbed her pistol's safety when she picked it up, her left boot holding a knife actually. She was prepared, somewhat. Never enough clearly.

"I remember when I was that old." Shepard could fondly account for, giving Tali a smile as, discreetly, she squeezed her fist and made a circle gesture with it. They formed a circle around Tali as they quickly left the scene. Only one more person to pick up before they headed back. "Hitman 1-4, I need a status."

* * *

Minutes earlier and JD, after some stumbling around the market, lost, had found himself in a situation as he entered the Clinic.

A hostage situation. Never had been in his training to take on, but he had heard the horror stories from his father: from other departments on different worlds who had to deal with Insurrectionists. Breaking down that clinic's door and facing off against three thugs with handguns and a hastily prepared meatshield that had been the Dr. Michel. The clinic had looked like a converted café, and because of that there had been a counter between JD and the other occupants.

"Who the hell are you?!" The man holding Dr Michel had demanded of JD. Guns were pointed all around.

He had about seven answers to that and most of them ended up with a firefight. He was glad that the software for his HUD had been able to transcribe the properties of that galaxy's firearms well enough, and, with enough firmware changes that he could do, hopefully, he might've been able to get it standardized. For now, however, using the Covenant Plasma Rifle as a base, he had been able to get the crosshair of his sidearm trained of the head of the man holding Dr Michel hostage.

Silence had been in the place of words; his only action was to keep aim as he slowly moved left. He could dive for cover, even with his pistol still trained on the hostage taker's head.

He told Mai he was good with his pistol. He had enough range time with his father to practice and prove. Enough Grunts had their heads bolted through by his SOCOM pistol to know that when he did aim, he aimed true.

There had been a former ODST in the police department. It had been where the idea of becoming one started within JD, and, because of it, he drew from his past for an old trick that didn't quite work with the Covenant, but for any Insurrectionist who dare put themselves in this situation, was fine enough. His left hand drifted to his belt as the hostage takers screamed at him to identify, for any word to come out of him at all as Dr. Michel sobbed and begged for her life. It was fine though as JD felt for the disk like object mounted in a pouch on his battle belt and the pin.

His helmet had been polarized for a reason, sucking in his breath as he tugged on the metal pin.

All hell broke loose when the bright flash of white rang out through the room, emanating from the flash grenade on JD's belt. He saw none of it though as his VISR kicked in, blocking out the bright light as the gunmen were stunned, their heads lined up through the ironsight of JD's M-11 offensive handgun. The loudest sound in that room would've been the flash grenade going off, for the suppressor on his pistol did its job as JD lined up the hostage taker's head and squeezed off a round.

The blood that flowed through the clinic that day came not from scalpel, but from a gun as the man dropped to the ground, eyes rolled back in his head as his rigid arms took Dr. Michel down to the ground with him.

One shot was all he needed, and could afford, for him.

Snapping left, two shots in the man's face and then throat, and then finally to the right, into the man's lungs and chin.

Before the ring of the flash grenade could stop ringing through that room, three men lie dead and JD had reminded himself in some small part how he had survived that long as an ODST. He wasn't done yet, as much as he felt the warmth of his pistol being shot five times that fast through his gloves, pushing forward to the dividing counter and hopping over to just above the dead men, peering further into the clinic for anyone else.

No one. Snapping back to the entrance, aiming at it, that situation had been started and finished in less than fifteen seconds.

He exhaled. Holstering his pistol, looking down at what he had done… Rigor mortis had kept Dr. Michel in the man's arms, JD crouching down and prying his dead man's grip off of her and dragging her away to one of her clinic beds. She was barely lucid, flashes going off in her eyes probably still from the grenade.

"_Hitman 1-4, I need a status."_ His earpiece within the helmet rang of Shepard's voice.

"1-Actual. Responding."

"_Send it."_

If JD could snap with his gloves on, he would've in front of the woman's face, trying to draw her attention as she was still recovering from everything. Still, she was a medical professional, controlling her breathing as she still saw the stars in her eyes.

"Dr. Michel had visitors. All E-KIA. She's fine. A little dazed though."

"_Copy all. Stay in position, Officer Vakarian will rendezvous with you and escort both of you back to the Embassies."_

"Roger."

"_Hitman 1-Actual out."_

"Who- who are you?" Dr. Michel had finally found her words, and her vision, holding her head in her hands as the ringing still infected her ears. The shell of the grenade was still on his hip and smoking, but it wasn't anything he couldn't deal with.

"I'm one of Officer Vakarian's friends. Don't worry, you're safe now." He felt like his father now, taking a knee by her, checking her for any injuries. She was fine, if not a little roughed up.

"They were Fist's men. Wanted to shut me up before I sent off that message to Garrus." JD nodded in his helmet as she groggily recounted why she had gotten in this situation. "If I hadn't called Garrus, I- I just don't know what would-"

JD holstered his pistol on his hip, letting his two hands grab onto both of her shoulders. She was shivering, scared to death about death. She was fine now, and as JD gave both her shoulders a squeeze, she knew it was so.

Looking back to the dead bodies however, it stayed his breath.

"I'm surprised you were able to… save me, like that." He nodded at that, "You do things like this often?"

On the floor, with blood pooling and chunks of brain and skull, wrote the tale of JD's first kills of man. He smelled the puke in his nose before it came into his mouth. Unfortunately for him he swallowed it back down before he repeated the ODST rookie mistake of throwing up with his helmet on.


	14. 1-8: To Galaxy

_**A/N: **_WE'RE FINALLY OUT OF MASS EFFECT'S INTRO FUCK YEAH I CAN STOP JUST HITTING CHARACTERS AND PLOT POINTS LIKE A CHECKLIST

Anyway, few things on the docket:

It was mentioned in a review earlier about what I intend to do about All the Stars when we start crossing over from ME 1 to 2. Well I'll keep it all in one story. You can probably tell what I intend to do with how I label my chapters.

Also regarding perspectives: The real meat of this story is, of course, The Rookie and Noble Six. For me that means JD and Mai. Their development as characters will be what drives the story differences from canon, and most significantly with Shepard. In terms of who I'm gonna be sticking to it'll be JD and Mai equally, then below that Shepard, below that the Normandy Crew, and then I'll have chapters devoted to the Covenant or any pertinent side characters which need it.

Some of you guessed Usze, or an Elite, would end up on the Normandy, and I kicked that around for a while. However this isn't the place for it in ME1. Mass Effect 2 meanwhile will certainly have Covenant squadmates signed on.

In speaking of Halo-related stuff, the plot thread in the Halo Universe is not concluded, however I won't be returning to it for a while. Probably not until the end of ME1. As you can tell already, I'm consolidating or straight out not mentioning some side missions/sub arcs for the sake of cleanliness, but if there are scenarios in the ME games you want me to tackle feel free to mention.

As for Mai and JD dealing with the Covenant. Orders are orders, and, they're not okay with it clearly. JD keeps it well hidden, and Mai makes it known, however I'm not about to have them come to a head about this here. Destiny is surely playing off of this, I'm sure you've noticed.

On with this chapter then. At the end there's a bonus, just a little thing I'll throw in once and a while to lighten my mood, personally. I wrote it and listed it as an Omake believing it's not particularly important to the plot, but enough of you guys have been kicking around the idea that is presented in that Omake that I might as well sate some of you for your patience with this story.

* * *

_ **Section 1-8** _

_ **To Galaxy** _

* * *

Her father had been a mean son of a bitch, but she didn't lie when she said she loved him. He got her all the good stuff. Or, at least, he had. It was around the time the first murmurs of a court martial and a dishonorable discharge had surrounded the Ryder family did she stop seeing assignments to scientific outposts with the Alliance. She was a Ryder; in fact, she was Alec Ryder's daughter.

Sara Ryder, in another life, might've been a scientist herself or a professor at some xenobiological institute. She had that interest in the stars and those who lived among them. Though she was born into a life where she was daughter to one of the most famous pioneers, and soldiers, of humanity. It meant she was trained as a young child how to fight, and, when it came to her careers in life, it made sense to move into the Systems Alliance military with a MOS that put her, for herself, in the vicinity of the next great discoveries. It was a tad bit of nepotism that gave her the good assignments that related to the Protheans.

However, the fame of her father came with his infamy when he fell. It was a double-sided sword which she had to bear as well.

"_They had no right to do that to him." _Spoke her brother Scott, one night as the word that they were to appear at a Alliance hearing over Alec. "_He's doing it for Mom!"_

Alec Ryder sought into Artificial Intelligences in a galaxy that had seen them nothing but machines of war. He did it in the name of love and, for what he got, was everything short of actually being discharged, and that was coming soon enough.

It would've come, had it not been for Altis.

Sara loved sandy beaches. To her, it meant vacations. It meant family outings to Mexico and Baja California and warm sands with crystal clear water. It meant time off work. Despite all those things being present there on Altis, she was doing nothing but work despite being there for less than half a day.

It was a dome the size of one of the mega-stadiums in New York City: big enough to hide from the galaxy, too busy looking at one side of the planet with the Covenant, a wreck that had not been the Long Night of Solace. It was angular and blocky and grey, bearing the plasma marks and battle scars from a humanity losing a war. It was in pieces, but, thanks to the engineers of Captain Shaw's SSV Perugia, assembled planet side after careful re-entry with the Kodiaks before the Council showed up. Slowly, ever slowly, the light was being cut out from the area as the dome was being constructed quietly and fast.

Standing on one of the rubber boats being carted to the wreckage, its name stared back at her as she approached: "SAVANNAH".

"Savannah, Georgia?" Sara turned around, her brown hair in a pony tail, speckled by salt water.

The boat operator had shrugged. "Hell if I know."

The UNSC Savannah had come down onto Altis, and here, it would be dissected by a different humanity.

Captain Shaw had remained over Altis since that day where his ship had lost engine power and almost plummeted with the Solace to Altis. He had stood on that boat with Sara. It was his tasking now to oversee the Navy and its operations now, including giving the daughter of the Alliance's most infamous N7 a sitrep on the situation.

Turning over to her as the Savannah was approached, his almost regal blue officer uniform he wore on the Perugia was instead traded out with his away outfit, combat armor and a pistol on him. It'd been a long time since his last personal combat action, taking shots at Batarians on away missions, but here, with the dots of Covenant Phantoms and Banshees in the background, it was warranted.

"We've been able, with Mass Effect generators and buoys, to right the larger pieces of the Savannah." He explained, pointing at the level wreck of the ship in three parts: Engines, the Bow, and what remain of the mid section. The rest of ship had either been in pieces or vaporized outright over Reach. "There are some places, mostly around the ship's main gunnery compartments, that we've been slow on cutting open out of fear of accidentally blowing the ship's ordnance."

"Weapons aren't my specialty, Captain." Sara yelled over the sound of the boat's engine. "Are the crew dormatories and the Bridge still intact?"

Shaw recounted as he looked to the wreck. "The bridge is nestled within the ship's bow, so it wasn't exactly spaced and protected from the Solace's weapons, however fires and subsequent secondary explosions rendered bridge crew KIA. Same story with the crew quarters." He paused. "Post-crew death however some of the ship's redundant systems kicked in and contained it."

Shaw shuddered to think that happening on his own ship, but, at the very least, he honored the crew of the Savannah well.

Much of Altis's wet-water navy and civilian ships had been taken over by the Alliance, those that had called Altis home had been mostly willing to leave it behind with Alliance recuperation. Living on the same planet as an exotic and, evidently, deadly Alien covenant had left the question of living there a rather cut and dry path. Those that did want to return had been given the FIrst Contact policy legistlation of non-interference.

Though that was exactly opposite what the Alliance itself was doing now.

Destiny and the Covenant had known the Savannah had come down with them, and, indeed the question of humanity scavenging from another humanity had been a non-issue. It was all heretical and not, exactly an issue in the long run, only magnified among Covenant leadership upon the fact that a Spartan and ODST had been taken in by them and promised to be "converted."

It was a secret held between the Covenant and the Alliance: The Alliance leadership would keep the secret of the Covenant's true, genocidal nature while the Covenant would keep the Alliance's deal with them and their UNSC humans under wraps.

It was why Sara Ryder had been part of the research group studying the wreck of the Savannah.

An old tanker ship had parked alongside the Savannah's wreck, siphoning hydraulic and oil fluids out of it before it further polluted the waters. Otherwise more flat top ships had hosted, beneath the domes, the gruesome remains of the Covenant War.

Bodies upon bodies of UNSC service members.

Sara had been transferred from one of those ships to the Savannah itself. She saw, first hand, what it looked like when a human ship as destroyed and brought to ground. A sight that, rarely, not since the First Contact War, happened.

She was a soldier, despite her current position within the Systems Alliance, fought off raiders and pirates at Prothean dig sites before, however to see those bodies be that of humans disfigured in ways only decompression, the cold of space, and ultra heated plasma did, it brought home to her, and all those privvy to the Savannah, what the Covenant had done to a humanity that was not their own.

Excavation teams had taken to the wreck, restoring power to partial systems enough for the ship to vent any lingering toxic fumes and light what hallways still had lights. It offeres solace to Sara as her dingy rolled into the partially submerged deployment hanger of the Savannah, made for ships of her type to hit atmosphere and deploy ground troops. It had served as a staging point for much of the Systems Alliance recovery teams, teeming with activity.

The classic matte grey and whites of UNSC design engulfed them along with artificial lights as they entered the hanger, a Longsword fighter having fused into the left wall of the hanger.

"Now normally when the Admirality Board sends me updates on the Ryder family," Shaw started, waiting in line with a procession of other dingys delivering supplies or more people into the Savanah, "It's not good."

Sara glowered. "I'm not my father, sir, respectfully."

Shaw nodded, hands up defensively. "Oh I know, trust me. But I wasn't briefed much on your tasking here."

She had an answer, holding on as they came to the first lip of dry "land", a raised platform meant for Pelican transports to dock with. Dozens of men and women had been busy on it, the path to further inside the ship from its hallways leading to that hanger naturally formed.

Some had still been busy beating back the sea from the Savannah for its temporary submerging in Altis, others had been busy keeping systems up and running. People like Sara however, kept themselves focused on the ship itself.

"I'm here to study and verify the accounts of the Spartan and the Shock Trooper."

The Spartan and the ODST, Shaw knew. Stories of them and their subsequent evaluation after their recovery had haunted upper comms. It seemed only right that they were involved with Commander Shepard and Captain Anderson now, along with the quagmire of what happened at Eden Prime.

Shaw led the only picket of his fleet not reassigned to Geth-counter duty as per his tasking here. It annoyed him in some ways that he hadn't, but he had his orders.

"Tall order. But I heard the Shock Trooper was assigned to this ship when it went down."

Sara nodded. "The SSV Normandy is being requested to come here in a few weeks... Situation with the Council not withstanding of course."

"She was here, you know," A few of the servicemembers in the hanger had saw Shaw get off with Sara, a resounding 'Captain on deck!' throwing and echoing in the chamber as men and women alike rendered salute before Shaw saluted them all down casually. "The Normandy was over this planet when it happened."

Sara almost ignored the comment when, as they awaited for their guide, he appeared before them from one of the hallways toward them. It wasn't who she as expecting.

Shorter than her, more whiskers, longer snout, beige skin with rather feral mannerisms. In what they knew of the Covenant's hierarchy, these, save for special cases, had been the individuals that were beholden to even the lowest Elites: the Jackals.

Wide-eye'd, the eyes of a scavenger, it honed in on Sara Ryder and Captain Shaw as he approached with the other Alliance technicians.

"You." It started as he planted himself before them. "Sara Ryder? Captain Shaw? The bridge awaits." It'd be a place to start, but instead this squat individual seemed more intriguing to Sara.

Shaw was already familiar. "Kaal Roth." He greeted the Jackal with his name and motioned for Sara to nod in recognition. "He's our Kig-Yar expert on the Savannah."

Sara pointed out the obvious politely. "May I ask why you would be so entrusted to this topic?"

The Jackal seemed unbothered, his unlit shield-gauntlet on his arm as he rested, habitually, with crossed arms. "I've raided my fair share of human ships in my time, and survived." Oh. "Pays well to raid ships and survive. I usually get out before the humans light their-self destruct-" He paused. "Our humans that is."

His feathers ran across his spine like an avian, and, quite frankly, Sara would've been liable to identify him as a dinosaur. "Oh I know that look." He said sharply to Sara. "Look you're lucky it's me and not one of the Sangheili. They believe in our Covenant and don't get paid for it. At least I do, so I'm sane about it."

"We paying you then?" Sara gestured with her finger.

Kaal Roth winked at her. "I'm keeping an open account. Now are you here to interrogate me like that Salarian back in the city?"

Professor Mordin Solus had remained independently on his own research. The man was a civilian of the Salarian Union, and, if he had been liable to take up shop on behalf of his government and research on Altis, the Systems Alliance couldn't say no without the famed Salarian STG more than likely getting on their case.

He had been no end of conversation with the Covenant, on both ends. One of his more recent field cases had been the analysis of Shala'Raan vas Tonbay and the Sangheili Ke Nazhumee. The variation in Admiral Raan's sickness following direct exposure to Nazhumee had been no more or less if he had been a Quarian, and that had meant everything to the Quarians, the Flotilla itself in the process of moving to Altis to everyone's dismay.

"I'll leave it to him, Mister Roth."

"Just Kaal." The Jackal responded. Pure mercantilism reeked from his voice, and quietly Sara had wondered if that was the fault of the omni's translators, but thought nothing of it. The Kig-Yar were pirates, long ago, and it seemed just as the Sangheili remained warriors, they too remained mercenaries at heart. Kaal had motioned over his shoulder for Sara and Captain Shaw to follow, and they did promptly, passing by the corridors adorned with both lights reactivated and set up by the recovery crew.

"These ships posses a honeycomb design." Shaw had recounted to Sara. "Now even on our larger ships we didn't design it with the intent of tanking shots in this fashion. It's certainly some valuable knowledge to gleam."

"It would take at least a year for the first revisions and prototyping to happen," Sara had blown out wisely. "That is if we gleam UNSC design methodology as relevant to us."

"Should be." Kaal had snorted. "Humans are more trouble than the Hierarchs would say, but, I never said that."

On the way to the bridge Kaal had pointed out landmarks and familiarities with the flick of his fingers. Familiar naval terms: Mess Hall, Armories, Crew Quarters, Engineering, Commissary, spat out by Kaal. No Jackal spent his fair time raiding human ships without knowing what they were. It kept landmarks available to be read during the action. But even with how familiar these places were, it chilled the humans. The reasons why? Why Kaal had been familiar with this, and, in a smaller sense, they were standing on the graves of thousands of human crewmen from a different war, perpetrated by the Covenant not more than a few miles away, the Long Night of Solace imposing its form on the world itself.

Sara had been familiar with history, with human history. She picked up Human anthropology and history as one of her many degrees, but even though this warship had been marked as being nearly three centuries in her future, this was a human history she was stepping through.

All around, workers had walked with that weight, that mystification, and, in some regard, the feeling that they had been born lucky.

They weren't born in a humanity at war with the Covenant. Those that had come before Sara, they had been the ones that had to clean away and preserve the bodies after all.

Shaw had been one of them.

"How often did you raid ships like this?" They paused at a blocked off section of the ship, Kaal waiting for a floating platform to ferry them across a hole made by a plasma torpedo which had vaporized that part of the ship. Maintenance crews had been busy cutting away the debris.

"A lot, a few years ago. But the humans were running out of ships recently. Couldn't afford to send patrols in the places my ships would raid." Kaal said this with no impression at all. Nothing about how humanity seemed to be about to lose. He spoke of it as if it was a downturn in profits.

Shaw kept silent about it. He had thought too much about what kind of captain he might've been, given the life where his destiny lost the coin flip and he had been captain of not the Perugia, but the Savannah.

Sara had only begun the morbidity of her thoughts.

In truth, she didn't want to be here. But it was either be here or go nowhere at all. She preferred Prothean ruins than Human wrecks, but here, among the ghosts of a humanity lost, she had a prerogative to do her best.

A floating platform had come soon enough, transporting them across the hole as, in that brief bout of fresh air, did they all see the activity near the Solace in the distance. The Solace was a hive, and each dot: a member. Vibrating with activity, the numbers onboard the Solace alone was bigger than a great deal of humanity's colonies.

"Did you fight on Reach?" Sara asked Kaal, leaning on the railing of the platform.

"Scouted." Kaal nodded in response. "Took out a human communication relay before the humans knew the Solace was in position. Got out before the Demons came."

He spoke in such quick bits, disinterested pieces of information, one might've mistaken him for saving money with his words.

"Demons?" Sara pressed. A point on the preliminary information that had been sent her way.

Kaal growled, baring his many teeth. "The monsters. The men made of machines."

That's what they called Mai, and whoever bore the armor and the responsibility to uphold the survival of the human race, at any cost. The Covenant called them unholy.

"Any reason why Demons in particular?" She asked again, Kaal leading them off the platform after their short jaunt.

"The great noble, Prophet of Truth told us one day during one of his sermons," Kaal started with such regard it seemed to betray him. Even Jackals had their faith. "Those that have proven to stop our Great Journey, how can they be anything but unholy? Demons?"

Sara saw the burnt propaganda posters along the hallways as they continued, depicting the monsters of the Covenant beat down by the monsters of Man. "But they're only men, and women."

Kaal chuckled, and Shaw knew why. "If you have seen any of them in battle, you would understand why."

The bridge of a Paris-class heavy frigate was akin to battlestations inside of a 21st century tank. Needless to say, it had been wider and roomier, but every seat was in a station was recessed, even the Captain's. It was said by preliminary info as given by Durante and Gul that the larger cruisers had a floor plan more akin to the Alliance's heavier ships, but a heavy ship to the Alliance was about the size of the Savannah itself.

The actual size of the Solace had been impossible to stomach for some abiding by the rule of Mass Effect fields, however even when downgraded to the Ardent Prayer or the Savannah, their sizes had admitted to the galaxy this: Mass Effect fields had limited them, and what could be done without them could've been epic.

Further crewmen from the Perugia had made themselves at home in the bridge of the Savannah, oddly enough.

"Captain on the bridge!"

They all came out and back down with Shaw's formalities.

"From here we've been able to tap into the Savannah's inherent systems and keep a track on the recovery efforts. What wasn't blasted we've been able to use." He explained. At one of the wall mounted consoles a damage report had read across the ship's infrastructure that the Alliance crew on the ground had been able to extrapolate data from and work off of. "My engineers have been able to start putting the pieces back together, as far as they can understand it."

Sara raised her eyebrow. "What's Alliance HQ's goal with this?" She asked.

Shaw removed the cap from his head as he ran his hair back beneath it. "We're not trying to raise the ship, if that's what you're asking."

"Yeah? What's the plan then?"

"Get it working." Shaw clarified. "If we can get systems back online, we'll get a good look on runtimes and the working operation of this ship. The fusion drives that it runs off of is toast, but it's deuterium fission at work, we're just gonna have to go back and go to the pre-Mass Effect research projects if the Savannah needs it."

Sara nodded, glancing at her omni for notes. "Sounds like a project."

"Different from yours, surely." Shaw lampshaded.

Kaal had wandered over to the Captain's console, very notedly standing at what appeared to be a tubular stand, an emitter of some sort topping it. He glared his eyes at it, but the stand did nothing in return. It was a shame, he reasoned with himself, turning back over to the bridge and the damage control section map. "Well, I'm paid by the hour, so if you want to go anywhere on this ship, I'll get you there from here."

"You going to be ghosting me this entire time, Captain Shaw?" Sara tilted her head at the man, and he had nodded yes. "Alright then. Well, I'm here to verify accounts which we have recovered, so, well, as far as I know most ships have a library or a codex of sorts onboard."

Kaal hooked his talons along his chin, nodding. "You'd be correct, but human ships are often hardwired to wipe their databases upon the initiation of any sort of combat. They were very staunch about us learning about them. Hell, to think that we found Earth by a fluke…"

By a simple tourist brochure, no less. "Would you have any reccomendations then where else to work? Any hard copy records? Crew manifests? Anything?"

Kaal kicked the console they were by. "Perhaps, if this hunk of metal was up and working. But no, as I understand it paper was not something kept onboard."

Annoyed, Ryder simply went back down to her own checklist. "We'll start simple then. What do you know of ODSTs?"

That very name sent shivers down Kaal's spines. "The lesser ones. Imps, as the Elites called them. They used to drop themselves onto us in great metal coffins. Suicidal, but sometimes just what the humans needed."

"Where would they prepare on this ship?"

For a moment, Kaal considered, looking at the diagram of the ship before nodding to himself. "This way."

* * *

It reminded her of the Marine wet-docks on old 21st century Marine ships, exposure to what had been below the ship seen right below glass panels that opened to drop the iron coffins that the Alliance had heard so much about.

Kaal had entered the ODST ready bay as if he had been breaching it. That was how his muscle memory worked as they popped open the door. It hadn't been accessed since the ship had gone down, just skirting the water line. The refractions from below the bay's grates illuminated the room blue.

Weapon racks, supply crates, screens broken that were perhaps to display briefings on the mission. Lining the walls of the bays suspended by hooks: pods.

"They didn't drop. This ship." Kaal had checked the corners of the room out of habit as Sara and Shaw took it with a little more casual pep. The flashlights on their omnis kicked on. Motivational posters and directories for drop procedures lined the wall.

"Propaganda reminds me of Cerberus media." Sara noted, "But I suppose that was a consequence of their war." Turning to the drop pods they had still been ready. "Excuse me?" She asked Kaal again.

The Jackal nosed at the pods. "The Humans attacked the Ardent Prayer with regular ship to ship boarding. Didn't have to use the pods."

In the recovered Pelican transport on Altis had been a bag of dog tags. Transcribed, Sara had all their names and so would check each pod for whose its user was supposed to be. There was, however, a first man on the list.

Some of the UNSC weapons still laid in their weapon racks, scattered about the floor. Shaw had taken the opportunity to palm one of them: a submachinegun standard for the ODSTs, its large suppressor bent by the ship's impact with the planet no doubt.

Kaal had fought ODSTs to death many times in his life. A long lived Jackal like him was a rare sight, but he kept his goals within the Covenant realistic. Even if the Great Journey was going to come, it wasn't going to come fast if the Humans kept fighting like they did. Materialism was a fine distraction otherwise. "If every Human fought like an ODST, I shudder to think that, maybe, maybe, they wouldn't have needed the Demons."

Silently, Sara had wandered to the pod that had drawn the Admiralty's attention the most as Shaw and Kaal touched the firearms of the UNSC. She had much bigger interests: the black pod that hung askew, but still, by anyone's measure, unharmed by it all. Spray-painted crudely on its front was an ID tag:

**J.J Durante**.

This was Chief Durante's pod. Much in the drop bay had survived, and for that, Sara was thankful. There was much work to do, and putting back pieces together wasn't something she needed to be distracted by.

"I gotta feeling that some good R&R is in my future."

"Is that so?"

Sara grinned at Kaal and then Shaw. "Research and Relaxation."

They wouldn't be the only ones researching though. Far from it. From the sensors remaining, cameras and biometric scanners, the Savannah still burned within its hearth. There had been enough reserves tucked away for someone else to subsist for quite some time. Just as this humanity would study the Savannah, a watcher would study them.

The man he was before he had become what he was now, he did a lot of studying, a lot of listening. Memories from back then had been easy for him to access, but he didn't do it often. Perhaps it was to disconnect himself. He wasn't that person anymore and was his own individual of course, but when it was appropriate, he held no resistance. So, he remembered his old boss recount to him about one of the children. She spoke to him about how he was lucky. How that was what he had. His quality. His reason for being there among all those that he had gathered for her.

Perhaps some of that luck rubbed off for him now. There was no reason he should've still been active.

In his virtual space, a digital place of staying for him, he would bide his time as he would listen to through steel and stone, water and waves. Things weren't as they seemed for him, but that was okay.

He was born two years ago, and he had five more to spare.

He could choose his moment.

* * *

Honestly it had been like seeing a thief come in and watch his pockets get patted down. All of the stolen items had come out and, for the gall of them, some would admit that they never stole those items.

It was about the same feeling, standing in the Council chambers, as the Council itself was left on hold by Saren Arterius. The only thing that would've cleared his name at all, even if they did call Tali's message fake and doctored, was to see Saren.

With both arms.

Being left on hold in public was as awkward as anything when it was done in the seat of Galactic Power, and, if JD had been a more ecstatic man, he would've felt something as the Council found themselves stumped, at a loss for words. He just didn't particularly care however. He was there, he knew what was right or wrong and didn't need to boast over it. He had no ego like that.

He had seen the Quarian however in shadows, across the hall, with Garrus, almost vibrating in her suit at her being proven right and getting what she sought to do done. It would've been adorable if it hadn't been connected to something so heinous. Though everyone had to give it to her: to hack into a Geth's memory core had been no small-feat given the self-destructing nature of most Geth.

Mai had been on the sidelines, in similar shadows, as Shepard stood triumphantly, arms crossed at her place and a shit-eating grin on her face. She deserved it, and having a giant woman there in armor the galaxy had never seen wasn't pertinent.

"You get on well enough?" JD had his arms crossed himself, looking down, viewing past the floor and thinking of only the last hour.

In that momentary break Shepard and Company had someone racked up an entire morgue's worth of bodies, unashamedly. If it hadn't gone perfectly it would've been a disaster, and, in some sense, it still was, but Pallin had been floored by Saren's voice as much as anyone else to not even think of the firefights and the gun downs that had taken place in the last few minutes.

Usze had returned to his Prophet with nothing more than a nod to Shepard. There was no goodbye needed for the Demon and her Imp. He had a feeling they'd meet again. If not by Destiny's orders, but by his Honor.

"Nothing I couldn't handle." Mai responded back simply.

JD wasn't surprised. He would've taken a cigarette out to smoke, but in that seat of power it'd be a disrespect they couldn't, now out of their frying pan and out into the fire itself with putting Saren's own culpability on the line.

"How was it?"

"Hm?"

Instead of smoke though JD aired something else that he regretted almost immediately speaking. Just like a drop however, there was no turning back.

"Killing your first human?"

She didn't remember. It never stuck with her as her first deployment put her on a planet in a deep infiltration op across an entire continent, picking apart an Insurrectionist colony day by day, body by body, bullet by bullet. It blurred together for her and, quite frankly, it was the training that worked. She was never supposed to remember something as so insignificant to her as killing a man.

She was silent, but looking at JD, a few moments passing before shaking her head. He understood.

He shifted some of his fingers toward her as he crossed his arms. "How're you doing?"

She blinked a few times behind her helmet. An odd question, but she had an answer. "I'm okay."

"I'm glad."

His words confused her, more often than not. She hadn't taken much time out of her life to judge a man based on his words, his actions, his feelings, mostly because she wasn't someone to do so. Kill or be killed, a target or not. Those were usually her parameters on judging someone. But for JD, it was different. It had to be now, at this point.

He wanted to be her friend, and, as far as she knew herself, she reciprocated the feeling. It seemed right, perhaps not to her, but to him. She wanted to do him that justice at least, for being who he was and the only one she could conceivably rely on in this new life of hers, but still, something remained.

A foreign something. Picking at her heels, itching her nose, furrowing her brow.

He was glad she was okay, and, to her, it didn't feel right.

"Th- thank you."

All he had did in return was nod his head, looking toward the Councilors as Udina pointed at them with such an accusational pose he wanted to be photographed for posterity. He did this all as a female voice recording rang out.

"_-Saren was heavily wounded in the attack on Eden Prime by his student, ironically, but he achieved his objectives. The beacon was accessed and we are closer than ever to finding the Conduit. One step closer to the return of the Reapers." _Councilor Tevos knew that voice all too well. She had found council in it herself once._ "__**Sovereign**__ has Saren now, but they assure me that he shall be healthy again soon…"_

"You wanted proof?! There it is." The vindication of a politician was nothing to snub at. It was a dare at Sparatus, to say something other than exactly what the Galaxy needed. If he didn't Udina would hop that distance and murder the Turian where he stood. Shepard would've helped as she grinded her teeth and expected the world of the galaxy.

But there was nothing else to say.

Tali'Zorah had proof beyond anything, extracted from a Geth itself. She had proven them all right, and Shepard knew that feeling too well to not know it had always been there: within herself. She was not to blame for Eden Prime to the extent the Council sought after. Nihlus was not her burden unnecessarily.

Saren never picked up, nor the owner of that voice. Any other conclusion was lunacy.

"This evidence is irrefutable, Ambassador. Saren will be stripped of his Spectre status and all efforts will be made to bring him in to answer for his crimes." Sparatus knew justice, and with that, he did not speak with ill-will. He turned to Ambassador Tevos. "Along with any that call him an ally."

"Matriarch Benezia…" Tevos had drawn on, still unbelieving. They had listened to that evidence again and again, and now, only now, she had to bare that name on her lips. Matriarchs were nothing less than the sum of the Asari: those that made it that old holding the literal knowledge of lifetimes to guide the Asari people. Surely, Matriarch Benezia would know better than to ally herself and associate with such an attack on an innocent colony. "She herself has many followers, and if she is allied with Saren, she will be a formidable enemy to peace in our time."

Valern seemed uninterested however. Salarians always looked at the big picture, not the people. "Reapers. That name they mentioned, and Sovereign… Is there any other info on them that we can find that wasn't pulled from the Geth memory core?"

Shepard spoke for herself. "All we know is from that core, Councilor."

And what that meant was something that, vaguely, Mai had heard, somewhere before. Maybe one of her deeper ops, briefings given by ONI, speculations and theories on the galaxy and why the Covenant had been fighting.

Precursors, of course, to any species who stood there today.

The galactic boogeymen perhaps:

"The Reapers were an ancient race of machines that wiped out the Protheans. Then, they vanished." Shepard spoke with as much skepticism as anyone. "Maybe Saren is using such a tale to rally the Geth to his side. They see the Reapers as God, and Saren as their Prophet for their return. Getting information from Eden Prime's beacon was within his interest. Maybe the Conduit has something to do with that."

Udina and Shepard alone stood up there as Anderson respectfully watched from the sides. He knew she could handle it. Not many people could: Speaking truth to power.

Sparatus sneered. "Listen to what you're saying. Saren wanting to bring back an ancient machine race that destroyed the Protheans? You speak as if that is what he's doing, instead of being a false messiah."

Shepard had gritted her jaw harder. "I know, Councilor. This might just be a fabrication for Saren, but-" She remembered her dreams, her visions. Metal and flesh. Flesh and metal. Where one began and another ended was not known, forming together into an unknowable mass of horror that made her want to tear her own eyes out. But dreams as evidence? She might've been bold, but not insane. "Fact of the matter is Saren is out there, Councilors, and for that, I wish to be out there stopping him, no matter the pretense."

Sparatus saw the play. They all did. "On what pretense are you looking for, Commander Shepard?" Valern leaned in as best he could across the distance.

Udina wanted to slap Shepard, but she was nothing but up to the task.

"Out there in the galaxy, things get confused: Power, ideals, morality, practical necessity." Shepard started. She read a book, a long time ago, about a man who thought himself God: to dictate the course of peoples beneath him with such cruel savagery that, when it was turned upon himself, when he became weak, it consumed him whole. That was her pretense. That was her belief of what happened to Saren. "When given an army, the resources as vast and unknowable as the Geth, it must've been a temptation to be a God to them."

Now and again, from the Congo, to Boston, to Mumbai and Kabul; Hanoi to Seoul, Pyongyang to Tokyo to Little Big Horn to Mogadishu and Shanxi. Every place where soldiers had a power over people by either gun or command, it was always the same, this truth.

Shepard looked up to the Councilors with eyes burning. "There is a conflict in every heart, between the rational and irrational. Between good and evil. Good does not always win. Sometimes the better angels of our natures fall. Everyone has a breaking point, and from what I saw on Eden Prime, Saren Arterius, in letting this happen, met his. Very obviously, he is playing God with the Geth."

She wanted a mission, and if she got the one she was pleading for, after it was over, she never wanted another.

"What are you proposing, Commander Shepard?" Tevos asked, point blank.

If there had been a million Commander Shepards out there, playing this same song and dance, going down that path, she made sure, then and there, she was to be the one they called her. Fire and fury emanated from her as she stood before the center of the galaxy.

At attention, arms behind her back, chest puffed out. Just how Alec Ryder taught her. "I am not qualified to prove whether or not the Reapers are a valid concern, if they are a threat to this Galaxy and all life in it. But what I do know is that Saren Arterius, no matter his methods, is one. Not only to humanity, but to all. If you still blame me for Eden Prime at all, then I wish only to make it right."

"How?"

"Send me after Saren. Give me your blessing, and I shall bring him here to answer for everything. It's what he owes the galaxy, and, if I have failed anyone here, what I owe them."

"The Alliance does not have jurisdiction where Saren would be operating." Sparatus gutturally muttered.

"But Spectres do, Councilor."

"We possible cannot-" They guessed wrong, what she was asking.

"Wait-" Shepard interjected. "Whether or not I am worthy of one, I understand, but I was being processed. That has to mean something. Nihlus was to see to that. So if nothing- **nothing else, **send a Spectre after Saren, and I will be there in support."

As long as she could do something, she could be alright. She could live with herself. To stand idly by, it was just as good as failure.

"That would never happen. We know who you are, Commander Shepard." Valern said with as much darkness as those facts belied. "Even before Nihlus came to you, the process was already on the way. People were interviewed. Those who have survived you, either by your command, or your orders. Those that you have taken orders from, and those that have seen you in action. We even interviewed your parents."

Shepard had smirked. Her relationship with her parents had been mended. As much of a trial as it had been taking back Elysium in some aspects after reinforcements got there, but it had happened. She owed it as much to herself as she did her parents.

Her parents was posted on the Kilimanjaro, having just recently responded to the Covenant there. She wondered what that must've been like, but she would never press. Work was work, family was family, and to talk of a job they all, in some ways, shared was never fun at the few dinners they had together.

"You killed an entire gang, in our intermission, Commander. That drive, that recklessness even… It's why we looked at you, Shepard, for a position among the Spectres." Sparatus admitted. Under any other context this would've been a day for Humanity: one of its best come to the Citadel to shoot up the damn place. But today, more than any other day, was for history. "What happened to you on Eden Prime does not take that away."

"What do you plan to do then, about Saren? About the Geth?" Udina spoke aloud.

Tevos offered a solution. "Reviewing evidence from Officer Vakarian's reports, the most likely entrance and exit vector of the Geth is within the Attican Traverse. To extend our fleets that far to counter-act the Geth, it'd require a deployment unlike any other in the Citadel's history save for the Krogan Rebellions."

"But would. You. Do. It."

Sparatus whispered something to Tevos, only to continue for her. "We'll reconvene with our government's military chiefs. See what solution can come together in response to the Geth if further raids like Eden Prime manifest."

"But your fleet is the only one able to secure the Traverse wholly. Stamp it out, and in the process, find Saren!" Udina hadn't the military touch, his battlefields were boardrooms and documents.

Valern knew better. Maybe it was because of his rumored membership with the STG that the Spectres were modeled after, maybe it was because he just knew how to run from those that would hunt him down, but he had an answer.

"We can't solve two problems with one solution. Not this time." The Salarian councilor said wearily.

Sparatus had more fire. "If we move our fleets into the Attican, any independent colonies or political organizations that have made a home there would see it as us enforcing ourselves upon them, regardless of why we're doing it. We can't risk a galactic confrontation with the Attican. Let alone the implications that the Terminus Systems might pick up on.

Galactic North had been the frontier, if using human terminology was the new nomenclature of the Galaxy. Beneath that equator would've been Council and Human Space, above it: Freedom and anarchy culminating in clusters of systems out on their own, for their own reasons, and if they had lasted that long the mettle to prove it. Galactic North had been where people disappeared. Out of both wanting to, and, sometimes involuntarily. A cowboy would've been at home there.

Mai would've been at home there if those that made up Galactic North had been the same type of people that she was deployed to deal with. The Insurrection, even now, had its echo.

"But what is your solution then?! Tell me!"

"Spectres." Tevos said before Udina started cussing them out as he was known to do. "We will send Spectres after Saren. You among them."

"What?"

Sparatus looked to Valern and Tevos in shock, but she explained. "Saren is one of our most treasured instruments. He has been a Spectre longer than my two compatriots here have been alive. He knows his fellow agents well, he _trained _some of them. But throwing a Human Spectre at him?" Tevos looked to Shepard expectantly. "I think it's what we need."

"No!" The Turian's protest echoed in those halls. "It's too soon. Humanity is not ready for that responsibility!"

"I'm not Humanity, Councilor." When Shepard spoke, she spoke as her forebearers did. She spoke like George Washington to the first American Continental Congress, or Aisha to her followers before the Battle of the Camel; human history and its leaders followed in her breath in way that was indescribable. Churchill and Spartacus, Alexander the Great and Joan of Arc; she spoke nothing less like them, and to the hearts of those that listened. "I am Commander Shepard, and if your standard for humanity is as high as you'd lead us to believe, what business do we have being here? Before you?"

* * *

What made someone who they were? It was what Shepard asked the Council, to dare say and explain to her why she couldn't be a Spectre for the sake of dealing with Saren. She said it with intensity that, even a distance away, Mai could feel herself tightening over. It was a question that she knew, just knew, that Shepard wanted to turn on her.

For Shepard's efforts, for her point, she was made what Anderson could not be.

She became a Spectre before the Galaxy, and then, promptly, all hell broke loose.

Just under a million humans, at present, had lived on the Citadel beneath a not so subtle measure of class that was, given their lack of representation on the Council and general racism and ill-will left over from the First Contact War, secondary to the other species. The only people lower were Krogan, Quarians, and Batarians. And the only Batarians on the station had been there illegally anyway.

So given sensationalist media already in love with Shepard, even across species, and the fact that the Human embassy it self planned a party for the night immediately following Shepard's induction into the Spectres, humanity as a whole had been given cause to throw a party.

To say that Mai was sulking in a corner having a mini-existential crisis as the Presidium played host to way too many humans was a little of an overstatement, but just hours earlier it was a question she didn't feel as she was given nothing but an empty mind to deal with.

A press conference was thrown, Shepard was formally inaugurated into the Spectres, and her mission had been clear: to hunt down a rogue Turian who had tried his best to sabotage everything for humanity. Any mention of the Reapers? Of what she saw? Kept hidden, behind the curtain. There was a narrative that was silently agreed to and Saren was made a terrorist to Shepard's mission. That was how humanity was to prove itself.

She would depart on that mission the following day, but, not without proper preparations. Not without bureaucracy rearing its head.

It was in bad taste for a Spectre to not command her own ship, and further worse taste for Humanity's first Spectre to be ordered by its first failed Spectre. That was the history that Anderson had with this process, revealed to Shepard now as the credentials were changed and she was, for the first time in her life, Skipper of her own command. She'd commanded battalions, fireteams before. Never a ship, but it was no matter, she had a crew to support her, and that was enough. She would repay them all, in due time. She was not the type of woman to forget those who followed her, not after what she had been through.

"Spectres operate their own accounts. The only gear we're legally allowed to provide to you is for the Normandy only and standard issue Alliance equipment." The C-Sec officer in charge of Spectre requisitions had explained to her and her away team. All, as it was chalking up to be, nearly thirty Marines and Navy Operators with JD and Mai included. It was an odd thought to Mai, surely. Even accounting for her body, the UNSC had provided her with the best. Best match grade ammunition, best weapons and tools for the job, and, when prompted, best discretion for her rules of engagement. It hit Shepard almost as hard that she had to buy, herself, weapons for herself and the crew.

"Our own accounts?" Shepard didn't seem too believing.

"Yeah." The Turian desk jockey nodded, rows of C-Sec weapons behind him at the armory and obviously a bit skittish given the Normandy's entire fighting complement had been there. "I don't make the rules, Commander Shepard."

"But why?"

That the Turian could offer a guess. "I mean, Spectres do dirty work. Say if one does some… less than acceptable actions and some of their gear is left behind, if the Council is found to be footing that well-"

Shepard rolled her eyes. "Alright, fine, I see your point. But I'll have you know that the Alliance doesn't exactly pay me all that much more than my crayon-eaters back there."

Emerson and the Marines all silently cursed, but agreed. Even JD had a chuckle to suppress with that.

"So what is she supposed to do? Just confiscate any funds she finds from any criminals or pirates we find out there?" Ashley's sarcasm had befit her. She was also right.

"Yeah I do believe that's within the Spectre's powers to do."

It was lunacy but Mai had no comment on that as Shepard simply asked, instead, for a line of credit for her men to be outfitted with shields as were galactic-standard and not Alliance-standard. That was acceptable, and as she was handed her module with the rest of the Normandy's ground teams, she had to think of what it meant to be a Spectre.

It very much followed her, hours later, in what was supposed to be a rather formal party in the embassies congratulating humanity turning into something just short of a block party in the Presidium.

Out of the corner of his eye JD had caught Udina puffing steam as he retreated to his private quarters. Obviously, this party was to congratulate his efforts in some ways, and, denied that, wouldn't be around as people just enjoyed themselves.

Why they had even spent time with a party, as Shepard grilled Udina and Anderson about, was beyond him, but apparently the Normandy needed time for refit and the official diplomatic documents signifying that Shepard had been a Spectre to process. One night was all Shepard could spare, mentally speaking. She didn't, in the span of forty-eight hours, come to the aid of a raided colony, try to evacuate a Prothean beacon, fall into a lucid coma, and then be grilled by galactic politics all for the chance to change into her dress blues at such a short notice.

At least she had dress blues, JD had noted as he walked through the menagerie of humans in Udina's office to his balcony where Mai stood on guard out of lack of anything else to do. Dress uniforms for him even would've been a short notice grab, Anderson admitted, let alone Mai. So as they found themselves sore thumbs in a celebratory occasion, they found each other, same as always, geared up for a war that seemed to be forgotten.

If anything, Mai knew that her rifle didn't need to be out. She just stood there like the olden red coated guards of Britain outside of Buckingham Palace. Like a nutcracker almost, JD thought as only by his approach did her helmet tilt toward him.

She flicked her index finger into a hook. A Spartan Sign. Private Comms.

He nodded as he found the railing of the balcony to sit on, thumbing her private channel.

"Chief Gul."

"Chief Durante."

In an atmosphere so filled with people that looked important they couldn't help but fall back on ranks and order. Kaiden looked uncomfortable in his corner as he spoke to a few of the biotic ambassadors of humanity on the Citadel and Ashley seemed over it. This wasn't her crowd, or song, or dance. Earlier on in the party, at the very least, the ODST and Spartan had their eyes out for any remaining Covenant, but Udina had alluded that they had retreated back to the Quarian ambassador ship for the night.

The only thing left to do was the thing that Mai wouldn't know how to do and JD would be out of place doing in his BDUs.

"Is this, at all, normal?" Her voice, even if she was right next to him, distorted over the radio. He shook his head in response. "I don't think Anderson had this in mind when he posted us on the Normandy."

JD shrugged, scanning the crowd. Shepard had been buried in it like a dame, even in her dress blues there was a strike of feminine charm she liked to put on. Quite frankly she was charming to look at and be around, JD hadn't even tried to fight with himself about. Though his thoughts went no further as on her dress blues the Star of Terra rode prominently. Humanity's highest commendation.

"Do you think Anderson will take us with him?"

Mai had picked up a hint of anxiety at the end of JD's question.

"Would that not be good for us?"

He stopped a shrug half way, reflexively wanting to run his hands through the hair at the back of his head, but only finding his helmet. "I 'unno. As far as I can tell, Shepard synergizes well enough with us. She doesn't strike me as an officer I'd hate to be under."

"I don't think she is accommodating of me." Mai had said instead, flooring JD.

"Huh?"

"She knows, or-" Mai stammered, her tone blank. "She wants to know who I am. Who I really am."

"Well, so do I, Mai." Mai tilted again her helmet, her gaze, at him, and JD paused for a moment. She held that faceless gaze without as much a sound. Not even a eyebrow raise that JD could work off of. "I do." He said again. "I mean. Haven't I been trying?"

Behind her visor Mai had blinked before looking away, back to the somewhat cramped space of the party, the balcony given berth probably because of her. "You're different, _to me_."

"Yeah?"

Mai's words rolled as if they ran over potholes. "You want to know me, because you'd be the only one who could understand. I think. I think." She repeated the last part, again, as if telling herself. "Commander Shepard does because… she couldn't understand?" It was hard to put words together when one's dictionary was imbued, in the majority, with technical and military lingua franca. This was the best she could do.

But JD understood, nodding to himself as a server went around in his modern white and black suit and served champagne glasses and snacks.

"I'd like to stay with the Commander."

She didn't. But said nothing of it.

JD's helmet had finally come off and he had seemed pale. Most of the day he had spent in it. The ODST BDU he was issued during his stay on the Savannah hadn't been rated for urban environments, so it was humid to him. Enough so that one of the servers came to him.

"You seem like you need this, sir." It was a whiskey glass that had been more ice than whiskey. He was right as JD silently thanked the man as he took it off the tray. Before he had taken his sip though, he offered the glass to Mai.

"Maybe you'll like this one?"

A night in Buffalo and JD had bought a small bottle of vodka and soda. Just to see if it tasted as well enough in this universe as it had in his own. For Mai she wasn't entirely convinced on the concept of alcohol after that night.

"Next time." She said silently. Not in a crowd, she preferred.

The other ambassadors of the Citadel races had made themselves known, shuffling through, giving their congratulations to Shepard. The only aliens missing now had been the Covenant, and they were the sin that the two had to live with.

An alien approached them, and although they tensed, there was nothing to it. It was a friendly face. One that spoke on their behalf on the galactic stage. "Officer Vakarian." JD greeted as he approached, busting through the crowd, still in his C-Sec armor.

The police always had a special place in JD's heart, and Vakarian seemed like a good cop. Something, an identity, that he could've put on him that made him look past the fact he was an alien.

"I never caught your name?" There was a vibrato to his voice that made him, and indeed all Turians, interesting to listen to. Almost as if they were a pet purring, always. It might've been a gross generalization but Garrus spoke, through the translators at least, in a young voice.

JD offered a hand and felt a Turian talon for the first time in the shake. "Chief Durante." Garrus offered the same hand to Mai, but she didn't budge, the placatingly opening his palms only to return them to his side. "This is Chief Gul."

Garrus looked back at the busy Shepard, her public face so amiable, so personable to even the high-class diplomats that called the Citadel their workplace and home. Udina himself was in the line of succession for the Alliance, and so it only made sense the other politicians flaunted a similar proximity to power. "Commander Shepard certainly knows how to draw a crowd, doesn't she?"

JD shrugged. "Wouldn't know, sir."

Garrus had raised his eyebrows at JD's formality. "The only Vakarian that you should call sir is my father. He's a CO in another division." There was a slight paternal pain in that, but JD could understand. He didn't himself have many aspirations, hobbies. Maybe one too many mystery novels in his youth and the fact his father had been a detective was enough to somewhat persuade him to actually become a cop. Fate decided otherwise, but he understood the workings of the police better than most.

"Fair enough."

Mai tilted her head at Garrus. "What do you want?"

Garrus grimaced. "Straight to the point eh?"

Mai nodded. No one came to them explicitly. She was too imposing and JD had his own aura of warning.

The man steeled himself, sucking in the spit in his mouth. "I know it's a really odd request, and I know it might not even be possible. But I'd like to join your crew to hunt Saren."

Behind her helmet Mai blinked in surprise.

"Ain't my call." JD shook his head, and Mai didn't do anything to make it look like it was hers either. An alien crewman? Perhaps. Perhaps not. They had enough to deal with themselves without having to adjust to being in close quarters with something not human. "But why?"

"Because it's the right thing to do." Garrus said, more to himself than anything. He was spooked at first when he saw JD as a human, and not a bot. There was a man beneath that armor and his face was of doubt. "You wouldn't understand, I think. In C-Sec there's just so much red tape, we end up fighting ourselves and our own rules than actual criminals- It's just-"

"Infuriating?" JD said softly to the Turian.

"Yeah." He looked to the man, expecting an elaboration on why he said.

The elaboration JD could give was that his father came home somedays, damning his own department. Damning the laws, the rules, loopholes and lawyers and just plain bad luck. Without rules humanity belonged to the animals, but sometimes right and wrong was so much more an animalistic feel that it grate against him. His father never took to the bottle, but he bellyached to his son. But he wouldn't say that now to Vakarian. All that was to be said was-

"My Father was a cop."

A connection. One that Mai saw, as if it was physical, able to be grabbed, to be touched, taken and formed. She saw it form between a Turian and her- not hers-, she thought for a flash of a second, between a Turian and JD.

There was a threat there, but said nothing but judge behind her blackened visor.

Garrus softened his expression. "What kind?"

"Beat cop before I was born. Detective when I was."

"Hm. But you understand then?"

The rules of war with the Covenant had boiled down to one point, and one point only: Survival. Once, long ago however, before the Insurrection detonated nukes in colony and used rush drugs to fight Spartans, there was one a common rule of warfare that was followed by Humanity in its better instances. To fight against an enemy while abiding by rules, it made the Spartan and ODST understand in that regard at least. JD nodded up and down once. "Not my call, Officer Vakarian. I'm sorry."

"Shame, then. I doubt you'll take me." A voice, not of vibration, but of filter. It was Tali'Zorah's.

Quarians in the embassy. Times surely had changed as Garrus clicked his mandibles in the Turian equivalent of an eyebrow raise. Mai tightened within herself seeing that. Always the mandibles that got her.

They had brought her back to the Embassy as, across the hall, Fist was recording his testimony against Saren. She explained a great many things about herself, her circumstances, and the Quarians when she gave up the Geth memory core with the voice recording. What she had been through had been enough to age her, damn the Pilgrimage, as was Shepard's words in a congratulatory sense. But that was how she found them.

Her people were at war with the Geth for their homeworld, and even with the Sangheili factor, she did not want to rely on them. So she sought for the Geth, and found one, ripped out its heart and bore secrets that held the Galaxy at peril. What it took to get her where she stood right now? Dead friends, stowing away, running from assassins.

_"So she's basically a space gypsy?" _Ashley had said behind her back to Kaiden, and the man, despite his better intentions about assuming things about other species, agreed.

But Mai heard that word before.

She hadn't heard it for a long time. Had no cause to do so. That word however, struck a chord deeply within her memory. It was a word shouted at her, used as a word of scorn. It was what every person on New Jerusalem it seemed, despite their own hostile hatreds of each other, called her and her mother:

Gypsy.

Mai was a Gypsy.

She had forgotten that part of her identity that she was.

Tali'Zorah appeared in Garrus's shadow. She had recovered from her events well enough, now in the safety of the embassies and happy to see other Quarians again as they had made themselves known in the Presidium thanks to the Covenant. Though ships weren't designed to stay in harbors. They were designed to go into the storms. That much Tali knew because she was a Quarian, fire in star colored eyes that shone through a smoky visor. It's all of the face any of them saw.

"You too?" Garrus asked her.

She nodded fiercely. "My people are important to me, yes, but the galaxy itself is at stake. I think that's worth it, especially if the Geth are involved."

She was older than both JD and Mai had been when they had gone to war. That much pointed out to the two of them and yet… They didn't know enough about the Quarians to render their own personal judgement, even if they wouldn't speak it to Tali. They thought her young. Innocence and ambition and duty and hopefulness wrapped up in a young woman.

If she were human, if she was on the wrong side of the coin in a galaxy that was not her own, would she stand before the Covenant in this same way?

Would Tali'Zorah stand before an enemy so ruthless, deadly, that it threatened to destroy her people?

Not questions for JD and Mai, but for Shepard. Like a starlet dressed instead of a gossamer gown, but masculine dress blues with medals adorning her heart, she had taken her leave of the crowd to grab fresh air by the balcony. To recoup with her people.

Dressed like JD noticed how broad her shoulders had been, how strong. She looked like she could break Tali in two.

"Mai, JD." She warmly said to them, both respectfully nodding to her.

"Ma'am." Mai added.

"Commander Shepard, we wanted to ask you something."

There was a champagne glass in her hand as Garrus stepped before Shepard, and she nodded, but not before motioning with a hand for them to put themselves against the balcony, she leaning on it, her back to the Presidium and the street party below. To see humanity celebrated filled her with pride, and it lightened her mood, all things given.

"I never got the chance to thank you, Officer Vakarian, for helping us out back there."

Garrus shook his head. "Nothing to it."

Shepard turned to Tali. "And you too. Without you I might've suffered the same fate as Captain Anderson."

She bowed, almost, tucking her hands within each other. "It's only right."

The Commander ghosted her hand over her chest, dipping to both of them in turn. "You're both good people, I mean that from the bottom of my heart... Now what did you need, Officer Vakarian?"

"As I said, Commander, just Garrus."

"Ah, forgive me."

"It's okay, and- and. I wanted to ask you if I could join your crew."

Shepard had almost dropped her champagne glass, but not in a negative surprise. "Did C-Sec okay you to further investigate Saren or...?"

"No. I'm not doing this with C-Sec. I'm filing for a leave of absence and I just want to make sure I, for once in my life, see someone get what's coming to them." He explained the same grievances that JD and him naturally knew of to her in plain words. It drove him mad himself, and, the only way he could live with himself was to do what needed to be done. He felt that same drive in Shepard. "Please. I'm capable. I'm a qualified marksman, served in the Turian Navy for a few tours, special marks and commendations, if you don't think I'm qualified please let me prov-"

Shepard raised her hand at Garrus. "If you truly believe Saren needs to be brought to the light, that's all I need from you. I'm glad you are capable of what you do but, Garrus, if you're cleared for this, then, I'd like to welcome you aboard."

So much, so much, did Mai want to speak out, then and there. To air her grievences. But they'd get her nowhere, leave her open for Shepard to dig into her more.

"Thank you Shepard, and I think..." Garrus motioned to Tali as she collected herself.

"Count me in. My people are important, but well, uh, I live in this galaxy. So that's important too." Not as pleading, not as dignified, but Tali wanted to too. Shepard leaned back onto the balcony's rail as she gripped her champagne delicately. She looked out into the dimmed Presidium, seeing it at night for the first time like the capitals of humanity. She had seen the cities of Earth beneath night and light, from underneath and overhead, inward and outward. Her perspective on life came from there as she sipped, looking to Garrus, and then to Tali.

All Turians had some form of military training, so that wasn't the issue here, with Garrus at least. Tali on the otherhand, she posed an interesting prospect. She was still a girl, in Shepard's eyes, with hope in her eyes and an adventure to go on. She didn't see it as a military, covert operation as everyone else had in some capacity.

"Have you been to war, Tali'Zorah?"

Shepard and her questions. Always prying. Always looking.

Tali didn't want to answer, but she did. "No. But my people have been at war with the Geth for hundreds of years. I can handle myself."

The slight headache in Garrus's head might've paid testament to that, but Shepard was unconvinced.

"I'll-" When JD spoke everyone turned to him, and he damned for even opening his mouth in the first place. "I'll teach you a few ropes. I know where you're coming from, Miss."

Shepard rose his eyebrow at JD. "Qualified instructor?"

JD shrugged a bit. "I've inserted on colonies with credible intelligence pointing at an imminent raid. Had to shore up, train, militia men."

If anything, that had been his only real interaction with the presumed Insurrection, but they never seemed to mind the UNSC coming when the Covenant was to come. It was never a matter of defense anyway, rather it was just prepping the colony for a fighting retreat in his experience.

Tali shrunk back for a moment, the idea of being turned into a soldier it was a weight on her shoulders that, when applied, made her buckle. "I'm useful in other ways, too. I mean, computer science, engineering, things of that nature."

Shepard had given a playful tap to her shoulder. "Anyone able to break into a Geth memory core? Yeah, I'd believe that."

"Non-humans serving on an Alliance ship, ma'am?" Mai finally struck out with her question. In truth, maybe Ashley would've been liable to ask the same, but with Mai, it seemed much more of a darker inquiry.

"My ship. My crew, Chief Gul. Spectreship has to count for something." Her eyes had, for a moment, turned commanding toward her Spartan. Expecting. They softened soon enough however. "They're capable people. I can see that," She turned back to the two of them. "And any willing to hunt down Saren is okay in my book."

"Ma'am?" Mai questioned again, but Shepard wouldn't have it.

"Just trust me, Chief Gul." Activating her subdermal omni, the tools on Garrus and Tali pinged. "I'm forwarding you clearances for my ship. Get your belongings together, and any gear you'd need. We leave at 0800, Alliance space dock."

Garrus had seemed to be brimming with vindication. "Would it surprise you if I said I'm already packed?"

Shepard tipped her glass at him. "Then enjoy the party, Garrus Vakarian."

Tali twiddled her long thumbs, in the same boat. "I don't own much, actually… Most of what I did bring on my Pilgrimage was left on Illium."

"Ah yes. A young woman gets rescued by a dashing captain and then sets off with her crew to go save the galaxy." Shepard had teased comfortably with Tali, and the woman shrunk a bit, embarrassed. "It seems only right you're in this way, so uh, hey, I'll forward you some funds, get what you need. Just keep the invoices."

The young Quarian's eyes almost lit up at this thought, her legs locking up as her hands were just short of signifying her giddy. For Quarians, kindness was few and far between, but Shepard radiated of it. "Th- thank you!"

Shepard had smiled and simply waved her off. "I take care of my crew."

She always did. It's what they deserved from her if they were going to lead them into Hell.

In Tali's visor, Shepard's face reflected against a smile. In her green eyes, looking into themselves for once, the ghosts of hundreds of dead Marines, haunting her.

She turned away before she remembered their faces. All of her losses, the bodies she was forced to climb over to get where she was. She turned away, and, before her and Udina's office, was the crowd looking up to her, having spotted her. They looked to her as they did like the poor, the huddled masses, seeing Lady Liberty before her destruction in the Second American Civil War. She was made a symbol, and Shepard knew she had their attention.

Years of media attention, of being prim and proper, of knowing the correct thing to say, it followed her like a curse as she put on a smile she didn't know was real, raising her glass to the sky like Liberty's torch.

Tali and Garrus, Mai and JD, they were in the frame now. That was the cost of being with Shepard.

Clearing her voice, even that silenced the crowds below, filled with Alliance personnel and other galactic citizens who wanted to enjoy the fun. When she spoke, the Presidium stood still:

"I'd like to toast to my fellow Spectre Nihlus Kryik. May the Spirits be with him through a speedy recovery."

She raised her glass to the Presidium, and, almost all at once, they raised whatever they had with her. She truly commanded people, no matter who or what. She was comfortable with it, but, more than that, it was natural to her as she downed the glass and the Presidium all gave her applause.

When Shepard turned away from the crowd, she had only then noticed JD harbored a glass of whiskey in his own hand. With a nudge, she offered her glass, and JD got the cue. With a glassy ting, they toasted, and JD drank.

* * *

On a space station, far away from the Citadel, a man watches the live feed from the Presidium public stream, watching humanity have its day in the limelight, despite the charges against it. Despite the galaxy itself challenging humanity. He had spent almost everyday in his new life ensuring that humanity would be strong enough to take that challenge and make those that dared pay for their presumptions.

He sat in his throne before the stars, staring into what seemed like the heart of the galaxy.

He watched, as he always did, behind not curtains, but entire stages itself.

He kept his eyes on Commander Shepard, just as he had done ever since she emerged from Elysium a War Hero, Akuze a Sole Survivor, and Torfan as Ruthless Avenger.

Perhaps more than that though, he smoked. He smoked with his old, 20th century ash trays, old 20th century cigarettes. He invoked the Mankind of the past in his very lungs.

His blue eyes, in the dark lighting of space in that glass room, shone.

"The predictive models never showed Shepard like this." Over his shoulder a perfect specimen of female kind. Not that he particularly cared for her curvaceous physicality. The perfection he expected of her was effectiveness for their cause. She wouldn't have been there, in the flesh with him, if she hadn't proved that time and time again.

A drag of dirty smoke blew through his mouth. "Agreed. This Commander Shepard is different from the simulations, Miss Lawson." Ashing the cigarette he crossed his legs, looking at said results from the simulations. Nothing but graphs and likelyhoods based on other human heroes and their actions as it related to his organization's interest. "I suppose we counted on her Idealism being more detrimental."

It was an odd sight to see: a crowd in the Presidium, Human and Alien, applauding a Human woman unified. All eyes in the Galaxy were on her, but the Devil was in the details.

"Freeze the frame." He spoke to the computer, and it did, sending an image of that frame to another holographic display offset. A Quarian, a Turian, Shepard and… and…

A figure in gray, and a figure in black, very familiar and acquainted to Shepard. The man narrowed his eyes on them through the feed. He had heard rumors from his contact in the Admiralty but…

"Miss Lawson. These two," he pointed his hand, cigarette still intertwined. "Let's look into them. If Shepard trusts them, then they might be able to keep our pulse on them."

Lawson stared at them in that same visual. "I've never seen armor like that in the Alliance."

They called him the **Illusive Man**. To be Illusive, one had to know, to be a step ahead, to hold fire at his very hand and take it in wholly. "It's because they're not Alliance."

* * *

Dust off the next morning and, for the most part, most of the crew had already been on the Normandy. Where else would they sleep?

In that morning hour for humans, JD had taken the opportunity to leave his sleeper pod and wander out to the Normandy's dry dock. If Chief Adams didn't want him to smoke near anything important, the least he could do was do it outside while he could

There, gazing off into the Citadel and the galaxy itself it seemed, he spent his morning with a cup of dark joe and a cigarette, letting this new world pass him by.

He saw Garrus arrive with his hardcases of gear and toiletries, 0800 sharp, tipping a nod at him in the distance as the two locked eyes. JD returned it. Minutes later Tali had appeared, a utility belt of tools and scanners supplanted a duffel bag of hers. They too locked eyes, and she had imitated a human wave. He also returned that.

In the end it wasn't him to judge, and they seemed human enough, socializing wise.

In his Alliance uniform, he looked like an Alliance man. Perhaps that was why he was poked on the shoulder by a Salarian in the middle of blowing a cigarette, only to choke on smoke.

"Hey, human, sorry. I usually set up my stall here and, also, my species doesn't like being around your kind when they use those."

Those big black eyes had kept him shut for a moment as the cigarette did its own thing and tumbled out of his mouth, onto the floor, but he recomposed. "Yeah sorry." He stomped out the dust before kicked the debris over the edge.

The Salarian saw opportunity. "Hey, you interested in any weapon modifications? I know how the Alliance military sometimes stiff their own on the latest and greatest."

Oddly enough the Alliance had set him up with a bank account with enough cash that would've made sense for an SOF Operator that didn't get out much, so he had some to kick around. He knew the deal. Some ODSTs spent extra on better, privately-produced optics or gear. He never did, but it was an option.

"I'm afraid I'm not interested," he waved off.

A good salesman never let the customer go. "Ah. How about armor mods? New boots? Good Salarian-designed cushioning. I know how you Marines ruck about."

"Not interested. Sorry." He said, more bluntly.

"How about MREs? Chef-created?"

JD's more urban upbringings as influenced by a city drowning in a borrowed New York City culture was about to come out, but Shepard found him first.

"Did someone say MREs?" Her voice rang out with a touch on JD's shoulder. Tactical in nature in fact, pushing him aside so she could take his place. "I'd love to talk if you can do bulk!" She had held her hands behind her back, perhaps, if only, to get the thankful squeeze of her fingers as JD faded away back to the Normandy. This was more her domain as the Salarian started speaking a million words a minute.

To his front on the dock, however, he found Mai. Still in her armor for the last few days. She didn't change out after all that time, and JD thought her insane for it. "Was going to help you."

"Your type of help?" The way she tilted her head was answer enough for JD now, after what time they had together. She considered what her type of help would entail and most of it was pure intimidation.

"Perhaps not here, Chiefs." His voice still made them clack their heels together and salute.

"Sir."

"Sir."

Captain Anderson. Former Captain, that is. Now relegated to desk work, from what they had heard. He had been in one too many situations like this and this was the straw that broke the Elcor's back. By his side had been Udina, they were here to see the Normandy off and to address the two special VIPs of the Normandy.

"I got your message Chief Gul, on wanting a transfer." News to JD, and that had woken him up more than coffee and tobacco. He didn't break form, but the fact that Mai even asked without telling him, it worried him. "Unfortunately, Commander Shepard made a request regarding you two."

"Sir?" Mai asked, almost unsure.

"For once I agree with Shepard on this, Anderson." Udina had boiled. If anyone needed coffee it was him that morning.

Anderson ignored the comment as he continued, "Shepard requested you to stay, specifically. She values your skill in combat and, now, more than ever with the threat of the Geth, we need someone who we have close to our chest out there with her."

JD furrowed his eyebrows. "Permission to speak freely, sir?"

"Granted."

"Are you sure there isn't any ulterior motive?"

Anderson sniffed in a breath. "If there is one, she's never disobeyed or broken the chain of command. For her to pursue her own interests against orders, she wouldn't dare." The implications there was too great. "And to be frank, Shepard needs humanity's best with her. You would be that."

It was commendation, praise, but even after all that time it didn't feel right.

Udina's eyes drew holes through both of them as he admitted this: "You know, more than anyone else in this galaxy now, what is at stake for humanity. You know what happens when we lose. It'd be pertinent for you to advise Shepard on that."

It was unusual to hear Mai just blurt out at all, but she did, from the bottom of her throat. "Shepard is… prodding." Mai said simply, unsure of how to take it.

"You have your orders, Chief Gul. If Shepard needs to know of your past, she has to do it through me. Otherwise, you have your cover." Anderson saw the worry, the reason why she asked.

Orphanage to orphanage, military school to military school. The past that the Alliance gave her was no more a past than what she had in actuality. She had no past, only what she was now.

"I don't think she would appreciate knowing the truth." Mai hadn't known why she said that. Maybe it was because of JD's visceral reaction to her being who she had been; his response to who she was that made her fearful of someone like Shepard, wanting to do something about it. Maybe it had just been revealing the truth to someone who hadn't been her superior, or JD, hadn't felt right. Whatever the case was she hadn't want that day to come, at least not as long as Shepard had been her CO.

"Tell me, Chief Gul, what do you think Shepard will do to you?"

"Sir?"

"You seem very worried about Shepard."

She was used to being attacked. With gunfire, explosives, armies and armadas of both human and inhuman kind. Not in the way Shepard had been though. In ways which she had never weathered before. She was unprepared to face someone who knew how to undress people in the way Shepard was capable of.

"She knows I am telling lies, both me and Chief Durante. For that, she might be indiscriminate in discovering the truth."

And what that means, more than anything, was that there was a crossfire that Mai and JD had been caught between. She trusted she could take it, but JD? She worried for him. If pressed he might've destroyed himself.

Anderson looked at her, long and hard, seeing the scars on her face, remembering what else had been covered by armor and body suit. Her pain was far more than anyone had any right to take, but, more than that, the pain she had given was worth worlds. "If I trust anyone in this galaxy with the truth, it would be Shepard."

Mai's face softened, just slightly, her eyes down, considering that fact spoken by Anderson. Perhaps the question of the hour was not who she had been, but who Shepard was. Mai could guess though. Shepard was Human. Human in a way that she herself wasn't.

Looking over to the woman in question:

There was a smile and a laugh coming off of Shepard's face as she bartered with the Salarian selling provisions. She patting his back as she successfully talked down the price for a barrel modification for her own Avenger rifle. She was having a good time, as if at the bar. That was the twinkle in her eye with the Citadel to her back: she represented something far more important than what a Spartan ever could.

If Spartans won battles and changed the courses of war, then Shepard changed the galaxy itself. Mai just felt it. Felt it in a way she hadn't felt since Ackerson, since Onyx, or even since she had heard of the name of the man in her reality that they called Master Chief.

"She'll tear down this galaxy in the name of justice."

* * *

About 12000 credits too much, but the Salarian didn't seem to think so. The metal blocks that their rifles used to shave off of for projectiles often came in many grades. Alliance ammo was good, but not the best, and when it was to be used again synthetics no less, she needed something with a little more shattering power. So she found it in steel ammo blocks sourced from Palaven, but it wasn't cheap.

The best was expensive, and better was often too much as well.

"You. Human. You the one they call Shepard?" She heard this voice behind her as the Salarian stopped talking at once, seeing the bane of their species approach him. His massing shadow covered Shepard and she had twisted her right hand into the quick-summon function for an omni-blade, just in case. If Saren was as brazen as to send an assassin to her right at the dock of her very ship she would meet his expectations with a butchery.

She turned around in a snap, only to be face to face with a species she had the pleasure of not fighting constantly. "_Commander _Shepard." Before she even stopped moving. She had a rank.

It reminded her of when she saw Mai for the first time, all armored up. The figure cut that impression, if not a little more intimidating in the animalistic sense of it. From the claw marks across his face and his blood red armor and skin tone. He smelled like death in a way vultures did. His eyes were like a predator's.

A Krogan. The Krogan looked right at the Salarian. "Don't you move." He didn't, leaving Shepard and him to talk. "The name's Wrex. Shadow Broker paid me a lot of money to silence Fist. Apparently he tried to break away from him. You got there first though."

Menacing. That's what he was trying to do to her, but she wouldn't have it.

"Sounds like I messed something up in your contract."

"Hm." He agreed from his grunt. "You had to take him alive. Get him into witness protection and shipped off the Citadel for his testimony against Saren. Made it basically impossible. You owe me."

"I do?" She growled out.

"Salarian. I'll pay for whatever she's buying." She didn't owe him in that sense, and it surprised her as Wrex opened up his omni and sent the funds his way. "Go get the stuff."

"Right away!"

He looked down at Shepard, eyes narrowing. "You owe me."

It wasn't a contract that she would've signed but the Salarian scampered off before she could protest. It wasn't that much money. Maybe three months hazard pay. "You a loan shark too, bounty hunter?"

"No. But I'm a Krogan, and Krogan's got to fight. Don't worry about the money. I want you to pay me back another way."

Shepard raised an eyebrow as she relaxed, "yeah?"

The Krogan nodded, also laxing his stance. He didn't mean her harm at that very moment. "I liked the way you shot up that club. Went right into the thick of it. Now I hear you're after a rogue Spectre, Saren, and I heard he hires Krogan too. I want to come along."

"Council post a bounty for Saren?"

Wrex shook his head once. "I'm not in this for money. I want to be where the action is, and frankly, knowing who you are, I gotta feeling you're gonna send me right to it."

"Just because?" Shepard looked at his scars, trying to explain each and every one of them herself.

"I'm a Krogan." He repeated. "It means that we were born to fight, and not only that, we did it proudly. Those that I hear are going with Saren, to avenge our people by destroying this Galaxy… Someone's gotta show them right or wrong, even if it kills them." Some people needed to fight. It was just in their blood, and Shepard could tell, Wrex had been one of those people. Maybe his armor hadn't started out red, after all. Even though she had one tank on the team, both an actual tank and Mai, maybe another wouldn't be so bad.

"You're a biotic. I can feel it."

Wrex nodded, knowing the same of her. "Not a wall I can't punch through or a target I can't kill."

"I'm sure one of my crew would like to test that."

"It'd be smart if they didn't."

Literally five minutes before leaving and they picked up another crew member. It felt right to Shepard to load up on them. It was truly a diverse effort for people that believed, not ordered, to go against Saren, and she was okay with that. More than okay with that. She offered her hand, and, Wrex was immediately assured. Her hand didn't crumple in his as they shook.

* * *

It must've been nice having a nice reclining chair to sit in. Shepard had inherited Anderson's quarters and, because of it, she had been offered creature comforts that she hadn't been with for quite a while. Though, she supposed, perhaps the chair had been designed for the pilot, even as he struggled to turn around in his chair and see the great red mass walk off toward the elevators.

"Wha-?! What the fu- What the fuck was that?! Was that a Krogan?" Just as she had inherited the Normandy, she had inherited its pilot. Joker had been as surprised as anyone about a Krogan joining the crew with no warning, but he was the only one who had verbally reacted as Shepard approached him, putting a hand on his headrest and leaning in to the Normandy's controls.

"At ease, Lieutenant. Worry about the ship, not who I'm filling it with."

He pouted for a moment before not caring anymore. "Aye aye. Just know if you want space racism, talk to Williams, not me, I don't mind."

Shepard chortled, gently patting Joker's shoulder. She knew what was up. "She'll come around, especially if I have anything to say about that."

Joker rolled his eyes as he floated a few diagnostics off to the sides on his control panel. "I expected the Great Commander Shepard to say that. With what her love for the stars, other species, curiosity, exploring heart, yadda yadda."

Her publicity pieces had always been flattering, giving her her best impression to those who read about her in documentaries or in the tabloids. "Always some truth in it. I'd rather love than hate, Lieutenant."

"Of course, ain't no wrong in that, but it's kinda hard to do an Extranet search on Commander Shepard without seeing a hundred different clickbait articles about what shirts you wear or your comments on any number of galactic affairs, as if your 140-character blog post weighs that much."

"Come on, having a name like Shepard? How is it not impossible to not run articles building me up? Trust me, I know what it seems like. I'm some idealistic figurehead, but what's wrong with believing in good every once and a while?"

He shrugged. "All I know is that you're gonna make this mission interesting, ain't nothing against you, Commander."

"Just Shepard," she clarified. "You don't seem like the type to care much about addressing their superiors appropriately."

"Now you're talking my language, and in my language my name is Joker."

"Got it." She gave him a thumbs up. She would've liked this man more in her cynical youth, wise-cracks and snappy dialog often got her. Though she had aged. For every nine articles on the Extranet or media speaking of her well, there was always one that spoke of her failures. Those were the ones she read and took to heart. "Ship ready?"

Joker glanced at his orange interfaces. "Cargos loaded, everyone's onboard. On your go, she's gassed and ready to kick it. I'd just be careful if I were you."

"Yeah?" She looked at some of the diagnostics of the Normandy herself. "Why's that?"

"Captain took the fall for you Commander, next time any funny business, you're going down. It's what they want, all those politicians. You can survive a hundred battles like Captain Anderson, but if you look bad while you're in your dress blues over something you did years ago, well, snip-snip."

"It's gonna happen someday to me. I know what I do. It's not a clean business, but someone's gotta go hunt down Saren."

Joker had breathed in, he agreed, truly, in his core. "Everyone on this ship believes in you, Shepard. One hundred percent. Trust me we got our own private channel so we can shit talk you behind your back."

Shepard rolled her eyes now, "I'm sure."

"But if you want to say anything to the crew, now's the time." Joker pressed the button, and that was that. "I know how you like to give a good speech."

That she did, but not for vanity's sake.

_"This is Commander Shepard speaking. We have our orders, given to us, not only by the Council, but by Humanity itself. Find Saren, stop whatever he's planning. Whether that means raising an army of Geth to rule all of known space, or ending it outright, I refuse to let any of these courses come to pass._

_We owe it ourselves to remember the colonies of New Haven, Elysium, Cyndrilla, Eden Prime, and any colony or planet where human life has come under attack, under siege, and know that what we're doing now is in their name._

_For every human life lost among the stars, know that they live on with us to create a Galaxy where their tragedy does not repeat. Where humanity's high ideals and responsibilities are put forth with our best efforts, and we do not have to fear to be taken advantage of because of it._

_We become the heirs of Marco Polo, of Lewis and Clark, Neil Armstrong, Sally Ryder, Jon Grissom, and all great explorers before us by making sure that humanity finds a home amongst the stars._

_It is up to us to protect that home, no matter the cost._

_I swear to you all, and I swear before God, that when we bring Saren before justice, you will be who they speak of when Humanity proves itself to the Galaxy._

_Prepare for departure."_

* * *

When all was said and done, when Mai felt in her teeth the docking clamps give way, she had found herself staring at JD as he leaned against the Mako and she against the wall adjacent. JD stared back.

"You wanted to leave this?" He pointed up at the intercoms, at Shepard's words as if they manifested physically. She had no answer for him. "_**You would've left me?**_"

* * *

_Omake:_

_n._

_A special video feature that accompanies an anime, such as a collection of deleted scenes or outtakes._

_Example: "In this omake, the characters are breaking the fourth wall to talk to the audience."_

**Omake One:**

"**The Author of this story prefers his Vodka straight. I'm calling you out JD you're a weak bitch."**

**Or…**

"**The Pace of Breath"**

JD didn't start drinking until his fourth deployment, which, timeline wise, it had meant his third bout as an ODST. His CO at the time smuggled Jack Daniels into the ODST bay and, given that he was unceremoniously named "Rook" that tour given his freshness to the ODSTs, was hazed. He could handle is liquor though, and wasn't outright destroyed by the funneling of soda and whiskey into his stomach by fellow Marines cheering him on. The next time he drank he had found the closest thing he had ever found to a girlfriend over Cascade: Dawn Harris. So on and so forth, whenever he drank something notable tended to happen.

But then again, he never drank for himself.

This was the first time he'd do so.

Their studies on the Turians, given their animosity toward the Alliance, had been wide ranging and intensive. Enough so that, when the two had decided they were finished that day in Buffalo, still more or less locked in their hotel room by their own admission.

They found, at least on paper, a threat in the Turians that they could quantify with their experiences with the Covenant. But the problem was they hadn't been.

"What's that?"

In the hotel provided mug he had given a two second pour of clear liquid before topping the rest off with soda. It reminded Mai for the UV bags full of saline before she, in her own experiences, remembered what that was. She smelled it from across the room as she sat at the desk in the room. JD had taken hold of the bed as his place of study and he remained there now as he put the ingredients to his concoction on the bedside table. It smelled medical to her.

"Vodka and Coke." He explained, using his finger to stir it all together. "I just wanted to take it easy for a bit, I guess."

"Vodka…?" Mai seemed unfamiliar with the word. She thought she'd seen it before, written on bottles usually filled with gasoline and thrown at her.

"Alcohol." Teaching Mai words had been his duty, every time she parroted a word as she did now.

"Isn't that illegal?"

Banned in the service, while troops were in the LOD, of course, but banned was different from illegal.

JD shook his head as he took a sip, as if to demonstrate. "I mean. If you're under 18 but, uh, I grew up in an Italian-household. Giving kids a glass of wine with dinner was normal, I think…? I guess."

She stared at the dark concoction through the clear glass of his cup, and, in the dim lighting of their hotel room, it reminded her of the coffee. They had been returning to that diner for more substantial meals, and, in the span of the week, had become regulars. It was because of that the coffee that was automatically slid to them was JD's order.

Dark as hell, and just the roast. With no other actual preference Mai had drank what JD was offered, ate what he had ate, mirrored him when doing these "normal" things. Did it matter to her if she was simply imitating? Was that as good as just being normal? Maybe, maybe not. It made her being out tolerable to herself, to not bite herself for being inadequate. If she had gotten used to JD's dark coffee, she could, perhaps-

"May I have some?"

He smoked on their balcony and, despite all of his attempts otherwise, Mai would smell the smoke strongly. She explained that her senses had been improved by the Spartan program, that she felt, smelt, and dealt with her senses and a measure far beyond him. Taste was included, and, as JD mulled it around in his mind as he slowly reached over the gap between their beds, perhaps her tolerance?

He expected her to sip though. Not to fill her cheeks and slam back a gulp.

* * *

He guessed wrong. Whereas he thought the woman who weighed more than twice than him, and was a few heads taller, could handle more liquor, it was actually quite the opposite. It tasted sweet to her, so she, at JD's unsure allowance, polished it off.

She was affected like a lightweight as if the alcohol had hit her three times as hard ten minutes or so later.

He could only do the courtesy of catching up as he downed several shots with chasers for her dignity.

He saw it in her eyes anyway, on how her wolf-like, cutting gaze seemed distant, out there. The eyes of a child looking up at the clouds. She was fighting herself in a way she hadn't before. Intoxication.

"I've been poisoned." She declared, her hands touching her face as she tried breathing in through her nose a gallon of air to beat back the daze.

"No you haven't Mai."

"No I'm serisos." Her English was perfect up until that very moment. Every word out of her mouth like a solid step with her feet. Now, she was slurring. "I rember when I had to infiltrate a Insurrection camp with… with… By in. With a going in a sewer, the fumes deteriorated my filter a bit and and… No it's not like this at all." Her hands had been constantly touching her face, her cheeks, as if straightening them out as she so desperately tried to keep her usual blank composure.

Had it been ethical to get a woman drunk? Probably not. But they had both been working hard studying and they needed a break. Mai's break was her bare minimum sleep.

"Mai. May."

"Mai. It's Mai. JD."

"Mai." He corrected himself, tucking the bottle somewhere he wouldn't want to spend the effort to grab. He was done himself. Not drunk, but could be. "You're fine. I promise you."

"Promise I'm condition greeeen?" She tried to put on her serious voice but she slid, her entire body tilting to one side before she righted herself, catching herself.

"Nothing I wouldn't do with you. Just like- Like." JD spread his arms out as if displaying all of everything. "Just like everything. Why would I do anything else?"

Mai had rapidly nodded to herself. JD's logic was sound to her, even now, and the determination on her face, it was determination brought on forcing herself to trust this weird man; this weird Marine who wasn't nasty or constantly chattering her ear off on how awesome she was to punch through walls and Covenant, or didn't look down on her for being a kidnaped orphan. He was quiet, contemplative, nice.

JD was nice. Nice to her, at least. She had seen him cut down many Covenant in the short time she'd known him and that was good. Very good. It was true for many people in the few times she was forced to work with people, but it mattered to her because he did it by choice, for her.

"You do, want, to keep with me?"

JD nodded himself fiercely. It was odd to hear him this talkative and in this tone, as if he was enjoying himself. "I feel like you would kill me if I didn't do my best."

Her eyes widened at that thought. Just those first words: _I feel like you would kill me._

Never. Never never never. Mai hadn't known if she had said that or they had collided in her mind, but she couldn't think of that. Not with JD. He had treated her well. Better than… she thought about this and now doubly wanted to not think about it. He had treated her the best out of any other human being ever since her Mother. And he did it because he knew it was the right thing to do.

Papers and tablets had been all over Mai's bed and she had twisted around to find one to concentrate on, twisting her body desperately to find the correct one.

"I'm gonna, finish up. Soon." Her words were thinly apart, clashing with the decorum she held so highly. She seemed panicked.

Panic.

JD knew panic. In dead ODSTs as they bled out. In civilians in pain as an Elite put a sword through them. At home, before he became who he did, when his mother worked herself up into a frenzy. Panic attacks. It was what killed her, in the end, when she heard that JD was MIA after the glassing of Persei.

His posture straightened as he reached out across the bed to her own, to do what he did when his mother had panic attacks: to hold her shoulders, to make her focus on him.

Mai hadn't really been in a panic attack, but it looked it to him, and, to be fair, this was the most panic that Mai had felt in such a way. It didn't come from her being a soldier, it came from her being her. Though she was still a Spartan, catching one of JD's arms half way as, when it happened, JD braced for the burning pain from a grip too strong.

It never came though as he closed his eyes, opening seconds later to find Mai looking at him back. Her expression was complacent, almost, understanding. It was as if she had analyzed what she looked like to him, and what he was doing: He wanted to reassure her. It wasn't a smile, wasn't a smirk, but the corner of her mouths they, just subtly, just because she couldn't fight this smallest fraction of emotion off, read of appreciativeness.

For once, her eyes seemed, out of lack of better words, soft. Soft, looking at him as her right hand held his forearm.

She held it where she had hurt him before, gripping him down to the bone when they first confronted an Asari and Turian. It didn't burn this time though, as she unconsciously drifted her thumb over the width of his skin. Delicately, no more than a second or two before dropping away. Her palms, her pads, were soft, inviting, and in that moment, it had been the first time she felt warmth from her. Physically, and otherwise.

Finding himself sitting on her bed, the slight shift in the center of pressure sent her, again for a moment, leaning into JD. She recoiled immediately, JD feeling her cheek brushed against the upper side of his head.

"I'm not used to feeling unbal- unbal- bal-" She tried to find words, beating through intoxication she had never dealt with before.

"Unbalanced?"

"Mm." She nodded. She reached out again when JD left the bed, but missed, the ODST not noticing as he took two more glasses for the sink. Tap water would help them in the morning.

"Drink. It rehydrates your brain, I think. Yeah that's how it works. Less of a headache in the morning." She took it without question this time, and, somehow, by the time she was done drinking, JD had moved her work material off her bed and his, organized somewhat on the floor. "Bed, please. Rest."

"But-"

He shook his head. "Me too. I'm going to sleep too. We've been going at it hard for a few days and we need get a sleeping schedule." A cursory look out and evening had turned into night. People went to sleep right now, normal people they had to turn into, as per Anderson's orders. "Please."

She wanted to protest. She had stayed awake for days on end for much lesser things. She had killed while much tired, much worse off, but JD was right. Normal operators don't take weeks to read history. Normal people don't get drunk off of just a mug. Normal people don't-

JD slid the sheets off of his bed in order to tuck himself in, before realizing Mai had been frozen, still sitting, cross-legged, on her bed. They had never gone to sleep at the same time, and he had to say it outright:

"Do we still have to keep doing watches, Mai?"

If he slept, she was awake studying, if she slept, vice versa.

She looked blankly to the floor, and then to the door and the balcony. Nothing had come for them. No terrorist, no Covenant, nothing and no one that had wanted to do them harm. Just people who wanted them on their best. The hotel staff took their clothes and sheets and washed them, military charity groups offering thank you notes and gifts from children across the world stopped at each door that servicemen were in and offered them their thanks and their gifts.

There was no threat. Mai drew her legs up, settling herself diagonally, just as she always did, to make herself fit. "Mm. No. I don't think there's an issue." She finally said, to the ceiling, wondering why it was moving.

It was a prospect: to be sleeping in the same room as a woman he had no real relation to.

He told himself he had a girlfriend, but-

Just as Mai had her thoughts to completely remove from her mind, JD had found his.

Yes, he found Mai, in her idle moments, when she seemed unbothered by her life for once, calming to look at for him but he had no reason to think any further on that. If she was at peace, he would be. Humans were social creatures and certainly no other line of thought could be at all extrapolated by the moments he stole catching glances at her just for the sake of glancing at her.

For a week now, he had stayed awake as she sent herself to sleep for the sake of rest and schedule. Concentrated less on the threat of a Covenant Elite bursting through the door and more the documents they had collected from the Extranet, he didn't pay much attention to her out of simple social regard. He wasn't a creep, and he had met plenty in his time with his father.

But now, even with separate beds, Mai's breaths were loud to him at least. For he was listening. To the ebb and flow of her breathing, how it started out strong, but subsided as she eventually drifted off to sleep easily for once. It was the sound of the wind, calmly soothing over a prairie. Gales over distant shores, perhaps in anticipation; calms before the storm. In the dark he could barely make her figure out, above the sheets. She slept on her back, her arms crooked as if habitually cradling a rifle, but eventually her curled hands unfurled and sleep had found her as her breathing became a metronome to JD.

It didn't take him this long, usually, to fall asleep, but now as the room ebbed and pulsed with the influence of alcohol, he allowed himself a buffer, to concentrate on anything to save himself from a headache in the morning.

He found her breathing, and soon enough, his own came in tune with hers as he felt that same peace; shared it with her.

For once they both didn't stir in their sleeps over the nightmares that had been their lives.

When they awoke, they awoke fresh.

Only later on the Citadel, when JD would offer her a drink of Whiskey, did they again think back to that night.

"Next time." She said silently to his offer, and she meant it true. It was nice to share a drink with him.


	15. 1-9: Fundamentals

A/N: A glimpse into the day to day life of the Normandys as I have planned. For me JD is easy to write this through because he is, relatively, normal, but fear not I'll follow Shepard around on her rounds soon enough.

Anyway, review responses. Also don't worry if I don't answer, if I don't highlight yours it's simply because I can't highlight them or answer them without detracting from the story.

_ **FlackAttack said:** _

_I would be interesting if there were any survivors aboard the Savannah in a cryo-chamber. Even more interesting if that survivor was a member of ONI._

It certainly is an interesting thought, but as I've established I don't think I'll have any more people from the Halo universe come over. JD and Mai are worth the world enough, in exploring a Halo/Mass Effect crossover, along with the Covenant. I do have plans though, completely bat shit crazy ones that will justify this story's existence beyond a character study.

Yeah just one review response today, because you all are raising some very interesting points that you should very much be holding onto, going forward. That and thank you for all the kind words! Means a bunch, and I hope what we have here today gives you some relaxation today.

No omake today. Not one worth a dime that is.

One of my intentions with this chapter is to explore things I think that should've been elaborated, in ME1, and I'm going to do that a bit. You'll see, in this chapter, a large part of it focusing on Tali and how I'd imagine that she was brought up to speed to fight on the level of Shepard and the rest of the crew. This also isn't just a cute bonding moment between the crew, if you take it as that. This is a consequence of Mai and JD being present: The Tali we'll see at the end of this all, because of it, might be fairly reflective of what world JD and Mai came from.

I think two call forwards today? Yeah, just two if you don't count Ryder. And, don't worry, I won't be mentioning his name too much after this until, well, he's actually relevant again. And he will be. This is also a story of my attempt in bringing all of Mass Effect together. I know, real big project. We're a few hundred thousand words deep and we just hit Liara.

* * *

** _Section 1-9_ **

** _Fundamentals_ **

* * *

For one of the finest Spectres to be hosted in a hospital named after a human, it was controversial, yes, but then again Huerta Memorial Hospital had literally been the newest one on the Citadel with all the newest medical implements. It hadn't hurt that the Alliance had volunteered to foot the dime of Nihlus's treatment, but still there was some ill-meaning behind him being posted there.

He had become Huerta's first patient. With any luck, he wouldn't be its first death.

So he laid there, a stump of a Turian, arms and legs amputated, skin burnt down to a black that only was seen in nightmares. He was the shape of a man, and yet barely that now, in his chamber in Huerta's Burn Center.

Councilor Sparatus had gone to him, almost immediately after he had arrived on the Normandy, witness to all manner of medical equipment getting shoved into him, burnt skin and metal being torn off his skin. It was a mercy he was comatose.

After their deliberations and crowning of Shepard as the next Spectre, making Saren an outlaw like the galaxy had never seen, he had returned to Nihlus. A mask had been around his mouth, helping him breath, the very, very slight ebb of his chest denoting that he did have breath, as much as he did look like a corpse.

The doctors told him that no one would know when he would emerge, if at all, but that was to be expected. That type of trauma he endured, to be alive was a miracle unto itself. Still, if he had awakened, he could verify the events of the mission on Eden Prime beyond anyone else.

Still, it was no easier than talking to a dead man. Perhaps, one day, the galaxy might've been able to raise the dead, but that was not that day, the second-best option hovering as an option in his datapad.

"I thought the very fact he was researching this was enough to cast him asides in even his own military." One of the surgeons had read the procedure that Sparatus was waiting to clear.

"It was close enough," Sparatus admitted as he looked over the technobabble name: _Simulated Adaptive Matrix. _"Enough for us to stop it. But there was merit in keeping the research."

An entire team was needed, twenty surgeons and doctors of various stripes. Asari, Turian, Salarian, and human. All needed to go into Nihlus's brain and set something straight, and leave something behind.

"It's a shame Dr. Ryder can't be here to help observe us." Spoke a Salarian doctor. "If anything happens we could at least blame her."

The joke was in poor taste, the doctors that knew cringed. The woman was already three-ways dead, but still, there was something more:

"I believe that family has been blamed enough. Especially if this goes through." With a swipe of his finger the records of what was to happen in Huerta that day was to be sealed, and the orders of those surgeons approved. "Proceed."

In another universe, another story, another proceeding of events in that galaxy, one of the human doctors in that room that would carry out the procedure would become one of the doctors on Project Lazarus. Project Lazarus, as carried out by Cerberus, would never quite carry out the same way as anticipated, however this was something close. Close enough to entertain the idea of reaching beyond the flatline and playing god with life.

As the doctors filed past Sparatus, looking through the outside viewing glass, he remembered Shepard's words and why, she thought, Nihlus had become like this:

_It was a temptation to be God._

* * *

The life of being an ODST was one of action. There was hardly a moment of true rest on deployment, if it hadn't been, at least for JD, skirting along Covenant territory or planet's currently under siege and dropping in. All the time spent in between those drops had been in preparations for those drops. From 0600 to around again, the preparation of gear, body, and soul had kept many an ODST detachment busy enough to not think about their often-impending deaths. Death was assured in that war, it felt to JD, so he had no business worrying about it while shipside. He could otherwise use his free time to sleep. So that's what he did, first night on the Normandy, underneath a new Skipper.

He felt the electrifying pulses that the stasis pod used to ease its occupants into waking, his eyes fluttering open to see only Kaiden in his own pod, directly across from him. The two of them had overlapped some during their bunk period, but JD would wake up first.

It wasn't the type of sleep he preferred, but he didn't wake up in a bad mood as his mind returned to him and, again, he woke up in that new galaxy. It still wasn't a dream.

No, just his new life as his pressed his palm against the glass and slowly eased his pod open. There was no fresh of breath air, but at least it smelled better than his morning breath that the pod was filled with in the scant few moments it took for him to leave. Sleeping at an angle was new to him, weird, but the pod's ability to put him to sleep was noted. It did it fast enough for him not to mind, and, if it hadn't been there, he could've done so himself anyway.

There was no, particular set schedule which JD had to adhere to. His position on the Normandy was purely as a Naval Liaison, and even that had just been a cover for his original purpose there: to acclimate to Alliance society. What duty he did have, it was for Shepard to decide, away mission to away mission. As for his duty's on the ship? He could find a routine.

For a moment he had almost convinced himself he had been living this life all along as he had groggily made his way toward the mess table, a cup of coffee somehow conjured by him and in his hand as he awaited the dispenser to shoot out whatever pre-packaged meal counted as breakfast.

If this were a UNSC ship he would've been standing at attention at his bunk with those who had shared his shifts, having changed into his duty uniform, waiting for his CO to get them going for the day. Those whose turn it was to sleep properly would hot bunk next.

The Normandy was unfamiliar in this aspect. It was less rigid it seemed, its duties and rituals that spoke for the rest of the Alliance fleet was less militant in a sense. This didn't feel like a warship, JD thought as he grabbed his tray for breakfast. It felt like a voyager, a cruise of adventure, like in the old stories his mother signed to him before bed.

Freedom was afforded to them, by both being onboard the Normandy and, now, Shepard's Spectre status.

They represented Humanity and the Alliance, but they did not exactly fall under their command. It was a breath of air that JD didn't know exactly how to breath, but as he discarded the plastic packaging and the smell of home fries and powdered scrambled eggs came up at him in steam, he figured he could roll with it.

Out from the rest of the sleeper pods, the rest of the Normandy crew that shift, along with a few of her new Marines.

"Chief." A few of them had nodded at him in greetings, uttering his rank. As far as JD knew, they hadn't had a problem with him as much as they did Mai. He was, seemed, relatively normal. JD hoped he was too, if that count for anything, chewing his breakfast down. It was an interesting feeling to not feel rushed at the start of a shift. Normally PT came first, breakfast an afterthought.

A bigger man, just slightly smaller than Mai it felt like, had been one of those Marines come out. The pod barely fit him, his blonde hair cut short, barely differentiating itself from his pale head. Square, it looked hard enough to give his helmet a run for its money for pure protection it seemed. He wiped some drool from the side of his thin mouth, grabbing his breakfast as he settled next to a bald man that JD recognized from Eden Prime. His bald head shone beneath the artificial lights, and he seemed thin. JD knew that he had history with Doctor Chakwas, and that he himself, if his comments were correct, had been a doctor.

The two had joined him across the table.

"Call me Doc," The bald man had initiated forwardly as he took a seat. JD nodded, offering his hand. Simple enough of a name.

"JD." He offered back as the big man offered his own shake. When JD did clasp it he felt the strength needed to shoulder a light machine gun with it.

"Name's Harris." The man finally drowned out in an accent that was not entirely unlike JD's own. The ODST paused for a moment, eyebrow raised. "Brian Harris." The big man clarified.

Harris was a name familiar to JD. It was Dawn's last name. But coincidences were rife in this galaxy. For a moment, he remembered her, and it brought him some serene peace. She was a good woman, good to him at least, but their reasoning for being together was more physical than anything.

Doc started again. "Been a fast few days, but I figure it's about time to make proper introductions." JD nodded in response, going back to his food. He'd been through these motions before. "Didn't catch the big gal around, she already up?"

JD shook his head. "Sleeps downstairs." He said simply. He hadn't spoken to her since they had left the Citadel.

"Ah." Doc nodded. "Just making sure."

It wasn't the pepper that JD had seasoned his eggs with that caused him to cough in his throat. He rose his eyebrow at the man. "It seems this Marine team is very interested in us." The ODST commented, still chewing, one arm lain on the table in a lean.

"Well, you two are very interesting people, naturally." Doc explained. He rose his hands defensively, casually. "According to Emerson and the wisdom of high command that is. I swear we don't got a problem with ya."

JD had shrugged. All that people were were how they carried themselves, what they did and do'd. If they treated him well, if they treated the people he cared for well, they were good people. "I don't got a problem with you." For a moment, the two Marines seemed relieved, but JD didn't stop as he set his utensils down on the table. "But if you've got a problem with Chief Gul, then it becomes my problem."

They were all each other had. Spartan or not, she was still someone who had fought in the same war he had. They were comrades at the very least, regardless of any... wrinkles right now.

Doc furrowed his thin eyebrows at the shock trooper, but he was sincere about it, that much the Marine could tell. "She your friend?"

JD nodded. As far as anyone was concerned.

Harris had landed his large body into one of the chairs; something of a post up, but JD could deal. "Then keep her in line."

JD was a calm man. A measured man. He had been through too much to throw himself into the drama of Marines. ODSTs who would actually see themselves better than other Marines, or lived in the rivalry they had with Spartans. Oorah -factor come full circle as egotistical servicemembers got distracted by human tendencies while fighting something inhuman.

He tried to remember if he'd always been like this. If he was as quiet as he had been nowadays, even growing up. He had friends, he had a childhood that seemed relatively untouched by the Covenant as they fought by distant stars. All his trauma, then, came from that of war, and it only happened after he developed as a man.

It'd been a long time since he was given moments to think of himself and who'd he'd become.

Mai put himself in perspective, he realized.

To Harris, he said nothing. The silence was his answer and both parties knew it as that. The least JD could do was push along the conversation to something less sinister, Marines slowly popping out of the sleeper pods.

JD gestured a finger. "Mind introducing?"

He cared now, because they weren't ODSTs. Or at least, figured the mortality rate of this crew was not to be as high as a UNSC ship in an active war.

Doc nodded, pointing, gesturing at each Marine present, giving names to those there and those already up.

Hitman was a raider company, he explained, recruited and put together from experienced Marine fireteams who had been out there along the Attican as QRF to colonies under siege.

"Our glue is Commander Ryder. We're here because of him, even if we're on loan."

There was an asterisk to the loan. One JD didn't have, but a cringe held within Doc and Harris. They weren't on loan. Ryder was in hot water and due a retirement, so he sent his best to his best student.

JD very much remembered him. Both he and Mai had, when knowing of where Hitman had come from, knew what their intention was here in some sense. As far as he could tell they didn't know that he and Mai had come from beyond their stars, but still saw them as a liability.

A darker man, younger, but with a rather stoic look on his angular face had stepped out of his sleeping pod, ready for the day.

"That there's Emerson," Doc started. "Real sturdy guy. Ryder's XO, and generally our squad leader when the Commander isn't up with us. Basically he was to our commander as to what Kaiden is to Shepard."

The man with the most regard for Mai out of all of them, JD noticed. Emerson craned his head over to the table, giving a nod to Harris, Doc, and his other Marines as they all settled for a quick chow before assuming their duties today. He held his gaze with JD for a touch long though, only, in the end, to give him a nod.

In his memory JD remembered the last time he felt like this among allies: and that was when he was tasked to a frigate that was not so secretly an ONI deployment platform.

The last Marine to emerge from that shift had done so with a hint of grace. Short, chestnut hair, olive skin and an unkind face. "Sergeant Bannon." Harris explained as the woman walked over, her coffee handed to her by a Hitman already awake.

"G' morn." South African. JD pegged the accent immediately from before when he heard her. She spoke to all at the table. "You twos getting all comfy with our resident Spook?"

Doc and Harris rose their hands as if guilty. "Networking, Bannon." Doc answered light heartedly. Bannon had posted up, a boot on a chair next to JD as she leaned in.

"So what's you're emotional baggage mate?" Bannon had sipped her coffee, feet kicked up on the table after transitioning to a sit. "Didn't like Ma or Pa? Bullied at school? Really hate Xenos?"

JD shook his head at all the implications, but he knew what she was getting at. Anyone who became like them had some wires twisted in the head. He couldn't say anything to the contrary after all. His career put him falling out of perfectly good ships in metal coffins. "Like to think I'm normal."

"People in our trade tend to get normal beat outta us, ya?" South Africa dripped from her voice, and it was an accent he recognized well enough. More than few colonies had adopted South African origins. She reminded him of ODSTs from there. Most of those colonies had become the first hit by the Covenant, and thus, those that signed up for the service became the last survivors of their people. With that large a chip on their shoulders, they were more than just soldiers. They were ghosts in the flesh. Bannon had read like that to JD. The echoes of what ODSTs were made of were within these Marines, the only thing that they had been missing was the war: the one that destroyed planets and societies.

These people, these Marines, they seemed comfortable in their roles. That maybe, perhaps, they had their story once. That this wasn't their first adventure out, high stakes and enemy fire defining every battlefield they stepped on.

Then, perhaps, JD realized, he had his own story to tell: the one of his life, kept to silence by secret and black ink.

"Commander on deck." The words from one of the Marines had spurred everyone up and out, Bannon's fiery gaze replaced by order. JD flew up from his seat to a rigid stand, just as he had done all his life it seemed.

Shepard had inherited Anderson's quarters. It was an unexpected move on everyone's accounts, even Shepard, but she took the small things when it came to her. A bed would've been good for her, as was quarters in general. She emerged in her duty uniform, but still, distinctly, with a casual swagger, her red hair in a bun. Alliance regulations must've been different than UNSC, so seeing any sort of hair long enough to be in that style had been jarring to JD. Even his cut right now had been pushing a length he had been unused to. There was a certain properness to her emergence out of her quarters, but it was admittedly offset by the fact of the matter she had tucked a giant bundle of fur underneath her arm.

"At ease." No one wanted to ask where she had gotten a bear rug, but their eyes had all said the same thing as everyone froze expectantly. "Ah this?" she offered, "Just some decoration." No big deal.

It had taken her less than a few seconds to come to the center of the deck, just before the steps of the sleeper pods and unfurled it out.

"Holy shit that was a big fucking bear." Harris seemed impressed.

Admittedly was JD, despite his stone face.

Shepard could shrug in some bravado, obviously putting on some show. "Didn't even bite me." She declared, obviously neglecting to tell them about the claw marks on her leg. It was the truth. Technically.

Like a body it spread out, like a butterfly, its fur washed down and put to a sheen. Nothing more or less for some grandiose presentation that Shepard could point to and say "I killed that."

"I…" Shepard started, putting her feet on its back, "I offered this to the Captain as some sort of gift for passage, like some old sailors in Greece or something, and, well, I guess he never got to see it." There was a sadness, a wistfulness to her words. She really did feel bad for taking the position that belonged to Anderson.

"Sure he would've liked it, ma'am." Doc nodded at Shepard as the rest of awake Hitman agreed, even JD nodded in concert. Some of the more colorful ODSTs and ships he had been with did such things, art projects as an outlet to the primality of warfare.

Shepard tipped her head in agreement as well before regaining the fire in her eyes, regarding her men. "To your duties, I'll be calling a crew meeting in the conference room in an hour."

"Yes ma'am." They all sorted out, leaving JD alone. He had no duties, and it left him alone. Normally, he figured he would've just loitered with Mai, tinkering with gear, reading more reports and documents on the Extranet.

However, things had been tense. Not since she had refused to answer him, locking herself behind her armor, not giving an answer as to why she had filed for transfers without him.

She never answered to anyone in her life that she hadn't been heeded to by command, and in that moment, JD had felt a fear inside of him that he had become the first. What she did was to just turn away. He was never a man to get angry, to get frustrated and to yell, but for the first time in his life he felt that draw, opening his mouth to her back as he reeled himself back in. His father taught him many things, and to control his temper was one of them.

"JD?" The ODST shook himself to full awareness, finding Shepard before him, a coffee of her own in her hand. "Chief Durante?"

"Ma'am." He straightened his form by reflex, but Shepard, with her free hand, waved him down, back into his seat. At that point his breakfast was almost done, but the coffee, not so. Time enough as Shepard observed to have a chat.

The way she had her hair in a bun, it seemed so unlike her JD observed. There was an air of class to it that he didn't expect from her. Then again it was remarked from time to time that even he as a rough and tumble Marine knew how to clean up if given a suit. On a ship this small he figured getting used to interacting with the Captain was going to be a day to day thing.

Shepard expected nothing less as she spoke to him that morning.

"Do you need anything? Before we hit the Attican, we're going to be stopping in Argos Rho for fuel and provisions. I know how you Navy SOF are different, so just say." JD nodded appreciatively, but he had nothing. "Anything at all." Shepard saw through his want to not even bother her.

He thought silence would've been an answer enough, but Shepard had sat there, a smirk on her face as she sipped coffee, staring right at JD as he tried to ignore that fact. He didn't get three more sips in.

"Fine." JD relented with a breath. "Some good actual comforters. Bedding and all that."

Shepard raised an eyebrow. "Aren't you in a pod?" For a moment JD thought Shepard meant something else, but knew better as he shook his head.

"For Ma- For Chief Gul, ma'am."

"Ah. So she does sleep down there?" He nodded. "Must be rough, woman of her stature not being able to fit in the sleeping pods… but yeah. Okay. I can do that Chief Durante." She lingered on him for a moment, the man unused to such a gaze as Shepard's. Perhaps now he knew what Mai spoke of with Shepard and how she looked into someone.

"Ma'am?"

"Do you know Chief Gul personally?" Shepard asked upfront, motioning for him to sit with her at the table, he did, returning to his breakfast.

"I've operated before with her, ma'am. We're acquaintances."

"Hm." Shepard nodded, glancing back at the bear and how it sat. She was pleased with herself, taking a sip of her coffee. "Still, asking about you Durante, if you need anything."

Again JD shook his head. "Nothing I can't order myself ma'am."

"Just Shepard, Chief Durante." She reminded him kindly. "I don't know who you're last CO was, but I guarantee you my ass isn't that hard."

He shrugged. "I believe you."

"I mean, I'd like you to find out." Maybe it was because of the coffee but JD had blinked at that. _Huh? _"So I'm serious, if I find out you need some small little stupid thing, later on, I'll send you an entire crate of it."

A dare. There was an ODST unit out there he knew of that had been raised in Britain: the descendants of the Special Air Service. The 22nd SAS. Their motto had been something he thought could've been the motto of every ODST out there, but they had kept it in-house: Who Dares, Wins. So if there was a dare there by Shepard he could only play ball, feeling in his front packet for a box, thrown on the table.

Shepard rose her eyebrow in interest as the slightly bent box landed on the table, JD nodding. "A smoker eh?" The ODST nodded somewhat shamefully. "Uh, sure, yeah. I'll see if I can get any good ones." Shepard's eyes darted back and forth, trying to dig in her memory. "I'm not a smoker but uh, I guess I'll learn?"

"Habit." JD said simply.

Shepard shook her head. "I won't get on your ass about it, unless you start hacking up in the middle of combat." He hadn't that problem yet, last he remembered. He had more problem with intermittent grogginess, but again sleep was his peace in this world. It'd made sense he had a draw to it.

"Thank you, Shepard."

"Anytime." She smiled at him kindly. "I should go. See you in a bit Chief Durante."

Pocketing his smokes, JD had watched Shepard leave up into the flight and command deck. The feeling that this deployment was going to be a long one setting in as he reached the bottom of his coffee.

* * *

Tali was tolerable. She was small, almost rickety, and had the mannerisms of someone far younger. Someone who had no right to be on that ship. Mai's shadow alone had covered Tali's form when the Quarian made the rounds and awkwardly introduced herself to the immediate crew around her. Hitman had been kind enough, recognizing an awkward coming-of-age adult far past any inherent anti-alien sentiment they might've harbored. Any anti-alien sentiment they might've had was far eclipsed by Mai's own. Mai saw no threat in Tali, as long as she didn't glance at her legs or hands and saw similarities in a species that seemed so unlike the Quarians.

Sangheili and Quarians, they were one and the same in some aspect, and for that, Mai had to have some regard of Tali. Maybe she could've learned something by corollary.

Garrus had been a touch more difficult for Mai to come to terms with as he had also boarded, setting up a bunk on the far corner of the hanger, away from Mai and the Mako. She concentrated on the Turians the most in her readings on Earth, forced herself to recognize not as Covenant. In her head the teachings of Onyx taught her anyone that hadn't been human was a hostile, and even then there were exceptions in the shape of the Insurrection. The way his beady eyes scanned the bay, the gait of a soldier within him as he strode around and set up, locking eyes with her in glances, his mandibles moving in response as if to say something.

Every time she saw his mouth plates move her own jaw would lock up.

How JD and him had seemed to recognize each other well enough she wouldn't know, but as long as he kept a hand off a gun while on the Normandy she suppose she could deal with it.

It was the Krogan that had tested her the most.

Tested the entire Normandy that is, to be fair to Mai.

Maybe if Jorge had been in her place, if he had set off the Slipspace bomb and ended up on the Normandy, the Krogan known as Urdonot Wrex might've gotten along well with him. They both seemed cut from the same cloth: soldiers who had lived for far too long.

Unfortunately, Mai hadn't been Jorge, and instead Wrex had found the only female in the galaxy just short of an Asari Matriarch that just on first impressions was worth a fight.

Inwardly Wrex thought that Shepard, if given enough time, would've been a competent foe, but if he came swinging at a moment's notice, the only person on the Normandy he thought would've stood a chance was this strange beast of a human.

She wasn't in a good mood when JD had left her, and she had left him with no real answer as to why she wanted to transfer away. She would've said that she would've also requested him to be brought with her, but she was not used to lying.

Having this oversized frog before her didn't help any as he first came down, dropped a dusty rucksack in a place he had claimed as his own, and immediately came to her, slowly, methodically, chest to chest. His face came up to her chest anyway, his face craned up to see her, to look for a face behind her helmet.

"I've lived for 1500 years, human. I've seen my very people whittle away and empires rise and fall in a blink of an eye. I've been the very edge of the galaxy and just short of going through the Omega Relay. In a hundred wars and a million battles, I think you're the first time I've had any intrigue in something as squishy as your species… Asides from Shepard of course."

Mai had been reading up on the Krogan on her omni, nothing for her to do until Wrex had appeared out of the corner and looking into her abode, nestled between Mako and wall. She had wisely came out more into the open when he approached. Everywhere Marine and crew member had looked at the two giants as they spoke.

"What do you want?" She spoke harshly. Wrex only grinned at that fire.

"You could fight me."

Mai furrowed her eyes behind her visor. "Do you want to?"

"Yes." They weren't speaking any louder than they needed to, but Wrex's answer silenced the entire hanger. Tali had been in engineering, and Garrus had been still sorting out his accommodations, but even then the Turian had stopped everything and looked over. As a cop he was born to be nosy.

"I won't."

"Why not?" Wrex said breathily, eyeing the two knives on her form.

"You wouldn't like what happens."

Wrex smiled and turned away, out into the center of the bay. "I told you human, I've lived over a millennia, maybe I want a die. You'd be doing me a favor. Besides, wouldn't you like to have the fight of your life?"

The boasting bellows of a beast was something she was unfamiliar with in aliens. Even the Sangheili, the Elites, in what little faith and magic they practiced out on the battlefield, their ego was spiritual in nature. Not down to earth, not in laymen's terms.

"You're on the Normandy for a reason." Mai had spoken out, glancing over at the Marines of Hitman. Some of them clearly wanted them to fight. They wanted a spectacle. "I won't fight you."

"What if I attacked you?"

In her mind flashed a hundred different ways to kill a Krogan. She remembered stepping through the skull of one back at Chora's Den, and she figured, if this one did attack her, she'd do it at least a little more cleanly. Adams had no business cleaning grey matter from the floor.

She said nothing, her form still as she and Wrex stared at each other behind pretenses.

This was the reason she asked to be transferred.

"Fucking love Shepard if this is the type of shit we're a part of." A Hitman had chuckled to another as they worked on their gear near the lockers. The Krogan and the Spartan twisted their heads at the speaker.

"Hmph. I guess I could take care of the welp first, if you'd like." Wrex spoke to Mai, observing the Marines as they suddenly shrunk beneath both their gazes.

Again, she had no answer, turning away and back to her corner.

She knew it was a reality of her new life that she would have to treat aliens with some modicum of respect, for they deserved no hatred from her that hadn't been born out of her training, her previous life. But to have them serving on the same crew as her so soon? The sensibilities of Shepard seemed maddening to her.

Maddening enough that when she heard her voice in the air, she thought herself actually mad.

It wasn't so however.

Just the intercom.

"_This is Commander Shepard. All field teams and non-essential personnel to the comm room. Briefings for our current deployment will be given. I repeat all field op personnel and non-essential crewmen to the comm room. This includes our guests."_

* * *

The smell of Marines, a small platoon, squeezing into the comm room had always been an interesting experience. The only one that would've been unfamiliar though was Tali, and she had her suit filters as she nervously walked in amidst the crowd of humans.

"School circle, ladies and gents. No need to be squeamish." Kaiden had riled them all around the comm room, sitting on railings, the floor, and what seats there had been. All with Shepard herself leaning on the holo projector console, waiting for everyone there to get settled, her coffee still in her hand.

To JD, walking in, he looked like a department captain at the beginning of the shift, gathering everyone together and talking of the agendas and wanted that day. He had sat in on a few in his youth, and so he felt comfortable going to Ashley, she having found a chair in that circular chamber and standing by her.

"Chief Durante."

"Just JD." He greeted her back.

"Helluva team we got here." She commented, her elbow tapping his hip as if he hadn't noticed. Indeed, he had. They all looked cut from the same cloth he had, if that had made sense to her. The electricity that existed in the air that came out from people who knew how to kill, so close to each other. Tension radiated from each body, ranging from comfortable to professional as the Hitmen all settled in against what little of the Normandy's original Marine complement remained and her crew not flying the ship.

"Joker?" Shepard spoke into her omni, "You also tuned?"

"Wouldn't miss the ice breakers, ma'am."

Shepard shook her head in a chuckle. "No such luck, lieutenant."

With her speaking what little chatter there was eased out, only to fully stamp out as one of the two odd ones out on the ship had stepped in. Garrus and Tali had already found their places, being offered seats by Shepard, they going for them uneasily, but slowly. What remained had been the red shadow in the shape of a monster:

Wrex had come in through the door, arms crossed, silent, keeping to the back as he locked eyes with the commander.

"Shepard."

"Wrex." The commander acknowledged in a nod, seeing the obvious last one in. She had to have been the last one in, it was the only pretense that she would've done.

Her boots made the metal clacks against the steel floor as the door finally closed them all in, her black visor seemingly sucking in the light as her form was barely seen in its grey paint. She stared straight ahead, away from Wrex, not even locking eyes with her compatriot.

"Chief Gul."

"Ma'am." Mai's voice rung out.

"Okay then, let's get started." Shepard pushed herself off the console, hands rubbing themselves as she scanned the entire crowd. She expected to see the crew like this at first, not in the bay preparing for a drop on Eden Prime, so she was pleased with herself in some small part. "I'm not going to lie to you. I don't feel good having the position I do, knowing Captain Anderson had to give it up."

Kaiden returned to his own seat, speaking for the mass. "Should be no trouble at all ma'am. If Anderson trusted you, we should too. Am I right Marines?"

_"Oorah." _The answer rung out in the group. It wouldn't be an issue. Not with Shepard.

She smiled at them all brightly. "Thank you." Turning over back to the console she had thrown up a map of the galaxy on the same screen she had bore witness to Eden Prime's attack on. "Now your op orders for the deployment on the Normandy is generally pretty vague. In fact if I remember correctly the language isn't much different than security detail. Now men and women of our pay-grade I can say, respectfully, aren't usually in those duties."

"Well ma'am, our CO usually isn't a Spectre." Emerson made his comment as he stood, arms behind himself.

Shepard paused as stepped back from the screen, taking it in and nodding. "Spectres usually don't have fireteams so I hear, so we're all just winging it." A few eyebrows raised, those with enough confidence or experience to make up op orders on the fly in the field had taken it in stride. "It's not like they gave me a guide for being one." Her coffee steamed at her chin, eyes furrowing at the galaxy map being put up.

The sergeant had kicked around his legs a bit, stretching, trying to find his stride with a new CO while not being XO. He was a little strung up tight JD noticed. "Being honest ma'am, Ryder didn't exactly operate with guidelines even if we had one."

Shepard sighed in some fondness. The Old Man taught her well, and she was thankful for it. For him to come around after all this time in the form of his raiders it was a comfort. For a large portion of her life Ryder had become that father figure for her instead of her actual father. Times had changed, her moody, edgy, dysfunctional family life had been righted with her own flesh and blood and she had decidedly made her peace with it. Still, he enjoyed his presence in some form.

"Well, if you want guidelines here, your op orders are in support of the Normandy and its CO." Some of the Marines shrugged, simple enough. "As for my Op Orders as a Spectre, well, for all the pomp of that speech I gave, it remains. We need to take down Saren and his operation. Piece by piece. This ain't even really for the Council. Eden Prime was hit and we need to bring him to justice."

She sipped as the men and women around her nodded and agreed.

"So are we acting in an SOF capacity?" Ashley asked up from her seat, excited almost, expecting.

There was a badge on Shepard's BDU, in combat, of the rank and caliber of her: N7. They were special forces. Of the highest caliber, and rarely had Shepard acted in that capacity fully.

With one nod, and a sip, Shepard affirmed. Some knuckles were touched and arm pumps had. SOF meant dirty, and Marines knew wet, wild, and dirty. Even Kaiden had his smirk, and the atmosphere was something Wrex could appreciate in his own snort. Tali however, she shrunk. What had she gotten herself into?

"We had a few leads, going out here." Shepard presented them on the holographic. "All of them in the Attican."

"Where we get them from?" Kaiden chinned up. "Council intel?"

Shepard shook her head. "Udina. We're getting Alliance intel boys out there as well with us, chasing any other leads, but as far as the Council is concerned we're the tip of the spear when it comes to this."

"Any other support? Human or otherwise?" Ashley asked, leaning in from her seat.

Shepard nodded. "We have other Spectres out there but none have the force deployment I do with the Normandy. Don't know who they are or where they be, but I just know they're out there. Asides from that, well, look to the men and women to your sides, because that's all we got."

What that meant: a crewed ship, and only its Marine complement. Just shy of sixty or so people. Most of them had been there, or, at least, the ground pounders.

"Ma'am?"

"Alliance Fleet can't follow us, too much at risk, and Saren would know we're coming." Shepard nodded to herself. "But it's alright. This is the perfect size. With an N7-rated complement and my own, we can clear systems fast."

"Ma'am," Emerson started. "We're tasked with an AO that is literally half the galaxy. And we're all that we got?"

Shepard huffed her own amusement. "I know, lucky, right?" Emerson shook his head but said nothing of it. High Command often had their infinite wisdom. "Not gonna lie to you, we're going outside the lines with this. The fact we got our guests here should be enough to dignify that." Shepard had her hands at her hips, gesturing at Garrus, Tali and Wrex, looking at the map of the galaxy. "If you want to get creative during our deployment here, get creative, just ring it up with either Kaiden, and then me first. If Saren's going to play dirty, we're gonna show him dirty, Oorah?"

"_Oorah."_

Shepard nodded proudly; the chant recited by all. Even JD, if only because of the group mentality. "As always, abide by OPSEC. Anything that happens in this deployment is under Yankee-White classification. Unfortunately the Galaxy knows what we're doing, but not how. Any ports we end up at, stay low profile, and assume security at all times. If this drags on long enough for a short shore leave, we'll be either back at Earth or the Citadel. We're in the shits now people, and because of that, I need your help. I may be a commander, but I need my ship behind me."

And they were. Every man and woman. From that galaxy and beyond.

A resounding "Oorah" broke through, and Wrex seemed amused as Garrus felt right at home in the military aura.

"Now our leads…" One at a time. "I'm gonna need some input on which one we pursue first, so here they are."

On the holographic display information was put up, blazing fast. Shepard had singled out a planet first.

"Feros is a colony out there in the Attican. Pretty much the furthest human colony that exists right now. Small, but it means something to Colonial Authority." Shepard grimaced a bit, taking a harsh sip of her coffee. Her years of being part of a QRF for colonies had made her bitter about the relative lack of security they had. "Being this far out, there ain't much in the way of official support we can give them."

"What's special about it?" Ashley asked.

Shepard nodded at her question. "We lost contact a few hours after Eden Prime. What little comms went out spoke to a Geth attack. And, as far as we can tell, this is the only planet they've hit. That must mean something."

"Hell!" Ashley spoke out. "If a colony is under attack right now we need to go to it!"

"Easy there, Williams. It's a raid, not an invasion. Last we heard colonial authorities were holding out as long as they avoided the Geth. So they have time. We're gonna get there but we have other time sensitive objectives." Shepard spoke business and Ashley detested it.

"But ma'am." Ashley protested. "Human lives are in danger."

Again, Shepard sipped her coffee, cringing. If she were in Ashley's shoes she would've been saying the same. "I know that very well, Chief Williams. But the life of the galaxy is as well. If I had not been tasked on anything else you bet your ass I'd be halfway there right now, but this is more important than human interests right now."

"Ma'am-"

"Chief Williams. Hear me out." Ashley went to speak again but a hand gesture from Kaiden waived her down. "As we heard in the intelligence Tali'Zorah was able to extract from a Geth core, another one of Saren's allies in the Matriarch Benezia. I don't know how well versed in Asari society we all are, but the fact she's a Matriarch means something."

"Yeah? What? She own a public access show and teaches knitting?" A Hitman had joked aloud.

Shepard knew better. "Benezia is a Matriarch in the Asari. It means she lived a long life-"

"Longer than me." Wrex spoke bluntly, affirming. "Some of my toughest kills were the like."

"Know anything Wrex?" Shepard pointed her finger. "Asides from the fact that most of them are near a millennia old and are the backbone of Asari society."

He shrugged. "Nothing specifically. All I know she's a Varren's bitch if I knew one ever."

A few laughs which Shepard let ride until she returned to her point. "Anyway. Word on the street is that she's got a cult of her own within Asari society and went dark a few months ago publicly. Fact that Tali's Geth core states that she's been working with Saren puts her out there with him for that long."

"She an HVT or a VIP?" Emerson asked again. Always so focused on the mission, JD felt. He wasn't that different from Mai it seemed.

"Depends how we catch her." Shepard said, throwing up a few images on the screen. "But in order to even entertain that thought, we gotta get in contact with this lady right here, see if she knows how to track her down."

She was young, JD noticed. Not much older than a twenty-year-old human woman. There was youth in her face that had been absent in their own galaxy. Even eighteen-year-olds that joined the service like him had lost it as they became coherent of the galaxy and the Covenant. Innocence.

"Liara T'soni. Daughter of Matriarch Benezia." A few of the Hitmen went quiet, something that JD and Mai had been particularly aware about as they saw familiarity on their faces. Shepard caught it as well. "Hitman?" She spoke the name of the Marines.

Bannon had ruffled the back of her head, admitting the fact hidden in plain sight. "Dr. T'Soni's a friend of Commander Ryder. Or, at least, an acquaintance. When Sara was around she often spoke of her reports in comparison to her own."

JD's face had been in some perplexion, Shepard looked at him to ask it. Mai spoke up first though, the entire room turning to her. "Ma'am. Commander Ryder awfully seems related to what we've been doing nowadays, especially since his team's here. Are we getting any official support from him?" It was a long-winded way to say it felt like the man was breathing down his neck.

Shepard's face soured. "Commander Ryder is being tried on grounds of AI research, Chief Gul." JD and Mai blinked in surprise. They hadn't known. "I doubt he'll be out here with us."

Tali had twitched almost at the mention of AI research. There had been one word for AI in Quarian, and in her ear as the translator played it back, it read again of "Geth".

"Anyway. Dr. T'Soni's currently on Therum, a mining colony not that far away from core Alliance space. We haven't been able to raise her or anyone at the colony, so we're obliged to go pick her up, see if she knows anything."

"Dead or alive?" Wrex muttered.

Shepard narrowed her eyes at the Krogan. "She's someone we need, Wrex. Not a bounty."

The Krogan snorted. "If she's at all in leagues with the Matriarch, well, dead might be better."

Perhaps. It was a thought Shepard considered. "Last planet," Shepard pointed again to the galaxy, "Is Noveria. Private charter colony in the Horse Head Nebula." Largely, the Attican on Galactic South East had been familiar to Mai. It had been the place of the Outer Colonies. She'd been to Noveria before. In her galaxy, if she remembered correctly, it had been named Gorgon Secundus. The Insurrection had a ground level shipyard hidden away in its frozen wastes. The fact that JD had been out here again, there was a sense of freedom that he hadn't felt. The Outer Colonies had been a no man's land as the war went on, and to see it now in relative peace, it gave him ideas of what the galaxy could've been.

"Private charter ma'am?" The ODST asked.

"Yeah. Privately colonized by big business conglomerates. I don't agree with it, but going private has its merits. Especially if the Alliance don't have the manpower or creds to take a colony."

"This borders Salarian space." Garrus pointed out. "It'd be nice for any human group to claim it, I imagine. At least for the Alliance that is."

Shepard agreed as she zoomed the map in on the sector. "Anyway. Intel points to some sort of Geth interest here. Some sightings of them keep popping up faster than Alliance and Citadel intelligence can squash them. Ain't no need to get the galaxy into a panic yet."

If only Shepard knew her future, she would've been crying out about Geth sightings everywhere just to get the galaxy into a defense spending frenzy. For as much as she kept the Reapers to herself now out of common courtesy of not appearing insane, she and the Council agreed the Geth were a danger enough to tackle as a Spectre.

No need for another crusade.

Yet.

"We're still looking into this one, but point is, I'm bringing up these options to get input. You're my crew, and we're on a fairly special mission in a fairly special modus operandi. I ain't doing nothing you all won't be behind, at least planning wise."

How particular. To Mai it seemed as if insanity: an officer asking for the opinion of their men. To JD it was refreshing, but peculiar. Still they both understood that even if they were from that galaxy and still in their positions now, it certainly was a situation to be for Shepard and being people beneath her.

"Play it by ear, Commander. We grab Liara first, before someone else does. Seems logical." Kaiden reached out, offering his two cents, leaning forward hand on chin.

"And ignore Feros? Come on man, people might be dying right now!" A Hitman cried out as Ashley agreed, echoing.

The guests that hadn't been human had nothing to say. They wouldn't feel right offering an opinion on a ship not even in their own political affiliation.

"Yeah, I know, it's tragic that Feros is under threat right now, but if we go there, do what needs to be done, and go find Liara to find her nabbed? Well we just lost our only actual, non-Geth lead." Kaiden spoke back, turning to the Hitman. This wasn't his Marine group, Hitman would have to be tamed by him at some point, but now hadn't been the time.

For as much as Shepard was a speaker, she was a listener, and as the comm room exploded in discussion she listened. She was good at that, Sun Tzu spoke of the information war in ancient China, she knew. Of knowing being the way to win. What knowledge and insight from her men she would take and grab. In truth, in some slimy truth, her mind had been made on where she wanted to go already, but it was her prerogative to understand the viewpoint of her men and women, and, if there was a hidden nuance that she could not at that moment uncover on her own, it would be done now.

Still, even with this, in an idle moment or two she looked for Chief Gul and Chief Durante. For the ten or so minutes the open discussion went, neither spoke a single word.

Naturally, she decided, that meant an entire research paper about them.

* * *

Shepard had dismissed them all, shortly after the discussion died down. "Kaiden, we'll talk more by navigation." Her XO nodded promptly before she turned back to her men. "You're all dismissed, and I'll be announcing where we're headed shortly. Back to your duty stations, we've got a long deployment ahead of us."

The Marines and personnel all shuffled out of the room slowly. Doctor Chakwas had been there too, even, but there was nothing much for her to say. "Oh, Chief Durante, I heard you were requisitioning bedding?" She passed him by on her way out.

For a woman who knew partly of his true nature, she didn't seem too much to act on it, or care. "Yes ma'am." Out of respect, not rank did he address her like that, he waiting for the crowds to funnel out before moving back to wherever he planned to go. Shepard and Kaiden had left promptly to the ops deck, Shepard mounting the stand before the galaxy map as he stood below her at a console, speaking of decisions to make and why.

"Things like that go through me, especially. How personnel conduct themselves in sleep either in the pods or alternatively are inherently medical in nature. So, I have to ask why you ordered it for Chief Gul and not herself." A hand had been at her cheek, finger tapping against her temple.

He looked for her as he answered. "She's stubborn." Chakwas saw the drama in that as she shrugged, wanting to instead pursue this another time.

Mai had her back to them all as soon as she was dismissed, not even a regard to JD. He wasn't a man to shy away from confrontation. Ships never gave room to hide, to slink away and avoid the inevitable. Still, as he looked at her go, his gaze was caught with one of the VIPs.

Garrus Vakarian.

He tipped his head at him, and he returned the same. Any man who had a cop as a father, he could see as kin in some way, and because of that, there was a certain ease that he had beneath Garrus's gaze. Before he knew it, he had been walking out of the hall with him. "Durante, right?"

He nodded. "Officer Vakarian?" They took the slow stride, letting the rest of the crowd pass by back to their stations, finding light in the glow of the galaxy map that Shepard had stepped up onto, thumbing through notes and drafting courses for their journey past Pinnacle Station.

Garrus shook his own head with a chuckle. "I'm not on the job, right now, Durante. No need." JD shrugged his shoulders, fair enough. "Garrus is fine."

In a shadow, a figure slunk. They both turned over and the pair had been made three. It was Tali. Between the lot of them, maybe a dozen words had been spoken between all of them, and nothing much past introductions. Staring into her visor JD was enthralled for the slightest moment. How many men and women had he known just by their visor? Never knowing their face? The tip of her nose was visible behind the cloud of her glass, bright eyes looking right back at them. The fact that most aliens had two arms, two legs, and stood not so differently than he, he had chalked it up to the fact that two legs and fingers had been a pretty good way to win the evolutionary war. Any actual alien qualities he had been getting acclimated to.

If anything, he hadn't been sweating in Garrus's presence, and that was a victory.

Tali and Garrus, for the first time perhaps, gazed across the command deck of the Normandy. Oddly enough, Garrus too felt at ease. "This feels like a Turian ship." He said, gesturing to Shepard on her stand.

Tali nodded in agreement. She could talk about ships. No need to do the awkward "Hi, I'm Tali'Zorah and a month ago I hadn't even spoken to a Turian or Human" shtick.

"I can't believe that I'm…" she chose her words carefully, unsure if she could even use them. "I'm serving on one of the most advanced ships in Council space. It's beyond anything I could've wished for." There was a timidness to her words. There was courage behind them all, of course. No one dug up intelligence from Geth without having some, but at the end of the day she didn't operate like that 24/7. Her adventure avoiding Saren's assassins had already taken a great deal on her.

Garrus nodded a few times. "I mean, it feels like a Turian ship, with how it's designed, but… well, I guess my service was a bit stricter." Regimen and schedule, duty and station. There was a place for everyone to do something. They felt out of place.

Tali's eyes lit up. "Yeah." She agreed. "It feels like I'm back on the Flotilla."

They were all cluing into the same thing. "You don't have duty stations here?" JD asked.

Tali shook her head. "I've, uh, they let me assist in engineering, Shepard and Chief Adams are more than happy with the help, but past that no."

Garrus also nodded. "I've taken some time to adjust my gear, read up on some C-Sec intel I picked up before I left, but asides from that I think I'm just on standby."

JD understood, it's where he was now, too. Still, when he wasn't sleeping, the least he could do was just to think of away missions in their near-future and who was going to be with them. The girl before him was one of them. He wondered; from what he had seen of the ship thus far, how PT could be done.

"Are we all down there?" JD started, motioning hands downward. "In the bay?"

They both nodded. "You Marines aren't too bad, I've heard worse from joint-training exercises." Garrus poked fun at him, and he refused to correct him that he was now Navy, if anything. "It's just Chief Gul that's… ah, interesting? Yeah that's the word."

Tali shivered at the thought of her. "Keelah. I'm still not convinced she's human." Distantly, in the back of JD's head, he still thought that, but he assured her in a shake of his head, she was, somewhere deep within her. "I've introduced myself to everyone I could, good impressions and all that, but Chief Gul is just… I don't know how you do it, Mister Durante."

"Just Durante is fine." He said shortly, trying to find a way to explain Mai's very aura and how it threatened to kill them all. "And yeah, she's special. Been through some things."

"Her name, it's May, right?" Tali asked again, unexpectedly. "She won't mind if I call her that? I don't feel comfortable addressing crew members by rank… It was never a thing on the Flotilla, at least, disregarding the captains and admirals."

"Mai." JD corrected. "And, well, I don't think she's in a good mood."

"Oh." She fiddled with her hands a bit, the crowd dispersing down the stairwells. "Well, Shepard makes up for it."

Ever alert for her name the commander herself tsked, not too distracted by her own work. "I'm sorry I'm like this," she said fancifully. "I just _really _like talking to people, knowing all about them and what not. So good on you for trying yourself Tali."

Returning to her own work Garrus had been a bit quicker on the draw, flicking his hand, getting the two to follow. "We could talk downstairs. Tali? Do you have any gear? I think I have a spare kit I could set you up with."

Feet first into Hell, and, quite frankly, it felt like JD was being dragged into doing it. The Demon inhabiting being Mai. Still there was no point avoiding it, better sooner than later he had to talk to her again.

"You said you could show me the ropes, right? Teach me a few things about… well, fighting." Tali had tapped JD's knuckle, and he nodded. He had offered as such.

"I can." He answered, confirming, the trio entering the elevator from the personnel deck to the well deck.

Garrus still thought about what gear he could offer to Tali, and it posed a question that was inherent to anyone who encountered a Quarian. Perhaps the idea of being around a being who was suited 24/7 wasn't odd to JD, but to Garrus it was. "Your choice in armor is awfully limited Tali. Couldn't you wear something without a helmet?"

Apparently the ship designers didn't invest much thought into the quickness of the Normandy's elevators, leaving JD and them in the awkward three man triangle, riding down an elevator ride they thought to be faster, in the midst of an awkward conversation that Garrus wanted to take back almost immediately. Tali fretted a bit, her eyes going half-lidded and annoyed at the Turian. Sure, it wasn't common knowledge, but it seemed demeaning of her to answer.

"No." She said cleanly. "Living in the clean environment of the flotilla has weakened our immune systems. The environmental suits protect against diseases."

The images of Quarians that JD and Mai studied had rarely been personal shots. More like, sightings or studies. The suits of the Quarians pictured had spoke of a culture surrounding them, as if they were clothes, designs and patterns highlighting belts and fabrics. Expression was derived from the suit.

Frankly the hoods of the female Quarians wore traditionally as far as he could tell reminded him of the hijabs of Islamic customs. Though the design of Tali's had noted how new she had been to the world: basic. As if the designs of wind, spirals in white traces were applied onto a purple hood. It wasn't the same, but JD often thought of ODSTs who personalized their own helmets: with teeth, with flames, with markings for drops survived or memories of planets lost or family distant. Maybe he'd ask what her suit meant to her, personally. The same went for Garrus's face markings, and how blue they burned into his skin.

"So your people are forever wandering, and now they couldn't settle if they wanted to. I'm sorry." Garrus tried to be understanding. He really did, not wanting her to explain something so very basic to her.

She made a sound in her throat, a shrug. She knew it well enough.

Perhaps being galactic refugees might've been humanity's fate if the Covenant had made it to Earth, JD shuddered to think. Running from them for the rest of their lives.

That was the measure JD had empathy and sympathy for Tali.

The elevator doors finally opened, and those Marines who not been on active stations right now had mostly accrued, playing cards, shooting the shit, hanging out amongst themselves. In this universe or in any universe with a Marine Corps, Marines acted like Marines, and, JD had no real intention of partaking in them at the moment. All he needed was his corner and shut eye.

Still, he thought it was worth speaking to them, explaining himself as the Marines of Hitman looked to them arriving out of the elevator.

A shade of movement in the shadow of the far side of the Mako. It was Mai, noticing him, their gazes latching for a moment before turning away.

"Any of you averse to us doing some drills with Miss…" JD turned to her.

"Tali is fine."

"With Tali?"

Bannon had been there playing cards with a handful of her men. "Ain't no problem frogman." She spit from her chewing tobacco into a can besides her. "Ain't no problem at all, human SOF training aliens." She laughed as she turned around, rough edges gratings against JD and the two.

Wrex had already been down here, shrugging as the three of them caught his eye as well. If it hadn't been Mai, Wrex decided, Bannon was a nice runner-up in him wondering how humans fought.

"Do you guys have any pointers for civies who come along on away missions at least?" Bannon turned around, annoyed, yes, but not vain. She nodded with some of her men.

"Yeah, we can help. We've had to escort a few scientists to Prothean ruins from time to time. Damn Batarians don't make it easy."

"That and civilian advisors have always come along, and if well, if they don't know shit but they expected to fire back, well…" One of the Hitmen had looked over to the Req Officer. "Hey, anything we can spare?"

Across the hanger the Req Officer shrugged, looking at the weapon crates of spare rifles and weapons. He had been keeping up with the conversation well enough to what the general thought was to Tali. An M3 Predator had come up first in its case, put asides as he looked over to JD. "Chief Durante, you're the only one on the roster that is slated for the M12s. You have a few spare, mind if she gets one?"

If he was training her, then letting her use some of his own stock was alright. Besides, from what he had felt of the M12 during Eden Prime it had served him well enough after the break in period. It wasn't as if he had a preference in weapons like some other ODSTs. He used what was given to him. The M7 SMG was just what had been the standard.

He nodded promptly; the weapons being given over to Tali as the Req Officer walked across the room. "You break it you buy it."

Tali huffed. As a Quarian she was used to hearing that. Any way a shop owner could screw one of her people over they would do that. Her eyes narrowed, but beat back the feeling to call him out. "Thank you."

The Req Officer nodded before retreating back across the bay, letting this little shindig take its course.

She held the two cases uneasily, not expecting what to do, a deer in the headlights if JD ever saw one. It was a look he knew well: from rookie ODSTs who had never taken part in a LRRP behind enemy lines and had to use enemy weapons.

The Marines looked at her expectantly, and Tali had been glad she had refreshed her suit's precipitation filters.

"What do you know gal?" A Marine from the crowd asked as JD folded his arms over one another, just short of asking the same question. She lightly placed the two weapon cases on the floor as she tried to find an answer. It was if she was interviewing for a job, and all she knew was that she was failing.

"All I know is just what I've learned along the way. Asides from a few days on my ship's range, I was never taught how to fight."

And yet she survived. There was a story she had yet to tell: of her flight from Illium and the assassins that tracked her and her friend down to death. The Marines there had picked that up from her: that there was a fighter inside of the Quarian.

They could respect that at least.

JD looked over to Garrus, a finger very slightly raised at him. "I'm assuming we won't be throwing her into a fight." He nodded to himself as Garrus agreed. "So self-defense shooting… Does C-Sec teach concealed carry courses?"

Garrus nodded again. "I've taught a few people. Yeah…" He seemed unsure. "I mean, if Shepard's away missions are anything like Turian Navy away missions, I'd at least want to know if you can carry your own ruck, endurance, all that."

All of this was dancing around this language: This was a nothing more than a twenty-two-year-old woman. Last time any of the military personnel around her checked, there weren't that many. Mai had been an exception in every regard, but even then, there were females there that looked and made sense: Ashley Williams came from a military family, regardless of their infamy: her trainer noted an intense aggressiveness and instinctual leadership drive within her. Shepard herself had traveled the world as a runaway child and came out on top, and that had been before she even joined the military at 18. Lisa Bannon, Hitman's second in command, she once worked oil fields as a younger woman. Men outnumbered women aboard the Normandy, but what women there were had earned a place in a world of masculine physicality and necessity. They looked the part, knew the part, and could handle it.

Inwardly, to herself, Tali had noted that the women that were on the Normandy alone could've taken on, in a square fist fight, maybe a dozen of her own people. Their strength was shown in muscles and in comfortableness in a profession dominated by the separate sex, and the fact she had been of a species whose very stature had become frail and a shadow of what they had once been, she too had the concerns they all had.

JD however saw past it. He had to. For in his past he had seen militias on planets soon to fall have children and teenagers take up arms. For all his protest and his begging for them not to fight, sometimes there hadn't been a choice.

Mai had seen the same in the Insurrection. Fought the same.

So with Tali, to the two humans from another galaxy, this issue could've been worked around.

"Nothing we can't get you used to." JD ground out at her softly, looking past a visor as he had done for most of his life.

"I'll try my best. I promise." She wanted to be here, on the Normandy, saving the galaxy. That was the best gift she could give her people, if anything.

Garrus had let JD lead the way, going down to the pistol case and holding the pistol, only to look back at the bay toward the hanger door. It was empty, and, although he wouldn't in his right mind even consider putting training rounds through any gun toward it, it sufficed for a good dry-fire range.

"Would setting up a dry fire range over there be an issue?" Garrus asked around.

"Mighty fine idea, Turian." A few of the Marines had echoed some agreement. They too were liable to get board without literally shooting the shit in some way. "But uh, how about you set it up?"

Garrus scoffed. Of course. "Durante, I'll get her set up on some dry fire. Point and shoot. See if she has the basic principles down."

"Gonna teach her how to shoot like a cop or a trooper?" JD didn't know why he asked, but it came from curiosity. Garrus's mandibles did the same things Elites did, and he tensed. Distantly in her shadow, Mai had instinctively reached for a knife before shaking it off.

"My father," he tooled with Tali's new pistol, turning it to a training mode. "He taught me to shoot with a sniper rifle. Prioritizing targets, and all that. Fundamentals should be the same, if I've learned anything. Long as I was quick on the draw and hit what I was aiming at before they knew what was coming, he was happy."

He remembered how many times he has a soldier had lived on the knife's edge of a gunfight: where shooting first was the only difference between a short firefight or a long battle for an inch of dirt. As far as Crisium City PD went, those odds weren't the same, and if a cop ever shot first it made the news. "Do cops shoot first then at C-Sec?"

Garrus looked down at his hip where his own pistol lie, chuckling. "Tell me, Durante, if your father was any good as a cop, what was his most effective weapon?"

"His notes." JD knew. Long and away he had known. The amount of times his father had to shoot someone he could count on his hands. Knowledge was power more often than not.

Garrus considered before shaking his head. "Hmph. I was gonna say it should've been his word."

JD chuckled, an actual chuckle. Admittedly Garrus's answer was the better one. "People tend not to listen to what cops say. Least that's what my father told me." The ODST recounted fondly.

Tali had palmed her pistol as Garrus gave it back to her, the Turian suggesting non-verbally that she keep the pistol pointed down when not in use. She nodded urgently, understanding. "We should trade stories, Durante. Stories of "things that our dads told us". Sounds delightful, doesn't it?"

"Sounds dreadful."

To see a Turian smile, it was a first for JD, but he was glad that he made it happen.

"I'll get her comfortable, set her up."

It was quite amusing to see Tali do finger guns instead of using the actual pistol as Garrus put her through the steps as if she was a civilian taking a pistol permit class, training her mental reaction time with Garrus drawing her eye to targets he threw up holographically on the far end of the bay. The pistol emulating recoil, but not actually shooting as it started.

JD could teach her, run her through, the fundamentals of combat. But for this work, he figured Garrus was more qualified. The fact that he too was an alien (Was that racist to say that he had been?) meant that Tali was probably more comfortable with him at first (Was that racist to assume?).

Besides, he had a more pressing matter to tend to: a woman in the shape of a machine.

Turning away from the crowd Tali had attracted, the more helpful Marines adding pointers to how to hold a gun and use it, he had approached the Mako's front end and a woman standing rigid against it, waiting for him it seemed.

"Mai." He reached out to her, and her helmet barely moved, no word coming out of her in turn. "How're you doing today?"

"Fine." One-word answers, but it was something as he returned to her and the lockers they shared. Moving to his, opening it for a fraction of a second, he found a picture he wanted to make sure had stayed there: Dawn, still in her peace, framed by a photo of sunlight and sundresses. Putting it back, he turned back to Mai, the Spartan having, in her silent gait, appeared almost chest to chest with him before turning back to lean against the Mako.

"What's up?" He posed her, leaning against his locker in turn.

No answer, she looking away down into some distant vision beyond the Normandy, eyes hidden behind her helmet. She probably hadn't even taken it off that entire night shift.

_'You wanted to leave this? You would've left me?'_

And so, as it was, it was only right that their conversation had picked up from where they left off. Nothing more had been said, only the silence between them that drew out until there was a mutual understand that no words could've been said in response at that very moment. So, JD left her to sleep. Time was something they all needed, and it made no difference now, he figured. She would remain on the Normandy, but this meant more to him than that. She was all that he had in that universe, and whatever that meant.

"I would've told you, when everything was set in stone."

"But why?"

She found her words and JD found his, and it staggered her. To be pressed on the attack meant she could shoot back. Not here, though, not now. She was vulnerable and that armor that costed as much as starships could not protect her as gunshots from Tali went off in an uncoordinated rhythm. In the shadow of the Mako, pinned against the wall, they had their privacy.

"Shepard is… not good for me." Every word she said came from a place of her mind that spoke, not as a Spartan, but as Mai. As a person. She was worried for once in her life.

"She's a good woman, as far as I can tell. A good officer. You must know that."

"I know. I know." She repeated. "But, she wants to know things."

"She's entitled to know her men."

It was so easy to ask questions of her. Mai was very easy to have questions about. Without Anderson to play a blocking position she had to weather all of it from a superior now. "If Shepard asks the right questions, attains the right information from the right people. Our cover is blown."

"It's not that simple."

"You're not a Spartan." She poked back at him. She was an enigma that blocked the light itself it seemed. She could not be ignored. She did not have a cookie cutter role or frame to fit into in this universe.

"You don't have to be that here." They were given new lives. How long had they spent in Buffalo trying to get that drilled into their heads? Mai more than anyone had gone over so many libraries worth of information about their new life it had made JD's own head spin, but now, here, when confronted with a woman who seemed so determined to be a part of history it seemed… It gave her pause that not even a pack of Hunters could.

"I was made into one. It's what I am, Chief Durante."

"It's JD, to you, Mai." He spoke as if insulted and she wanted to take her words back. "It's JD."

"JD." She parroted, nodding her head, sorry. "It's JD."

He took a moment, pushing himself off his locker, looking back, seeing the silhouette of his armor through the mesh metal. A new coat of paint, some new components, but it was still his armor. He might've been a hypocrite then, saying that to Mai. He too would always be a Marine, an ODST, but he meant it more than that. Meant it in a way that he could not articulate no more to himself than he could a Spartan of all things.

"We have the right to shut Shepard up. She has no right to know who we are. Do you know that?" She had never, in her time with JD, heard the stern in his voice, the metal of a man mad for once. He was mad that she did not understand the military as he did, because, of anything, it was the military she was supposed to know utterly and completely. "Our secrets are our orders-"

"I don't want to leave you." Mai caught JD's words in between breath and tongue with her own, causing him to choke. "I don't want you to leave me."

Her words were without feeling. She didn't know that, but they were. If they had been JD would've had more concern, but here, as they were, it was simple. Normal social connotations to words and declarations didn't apply to her, and perhaps that was for the best. She was cold, but it was the truth.

He blinked a few times before trying his best to understand. "Then why apply for a transfer without telling me?"

"To see if I could." She answered simply, her hand resting, held be each other over her stomach.

He needed more than that, so he stayed his words, gave his voice time to settle. He had never spoken so much with anyone in his adult life as he did Mai, and it strained him. Naturally, he fell back to habit: Four fingers touched his forehead before they closed in, only for his pinkie and thumb to be pointed out toward her.

_'Why?'_

She understood, and if anything, JD had a small shine of pride in it. "If the Geth are the most dangerous thing this galaxy faces, then I think we're fine." She grated her teeth. She wanted to scream but said it in nothing more than a whisper. The Geth were nothing to her. Nothing that she hadn't killed before. "We've faced worse."

"You don't know that for certain. You can't."

"The rhetoric of the Council doesn't seem to agree… and if it was the case, they know what I can do. They'd send me to missions I know. We know." JD's eyes sunk into his head and Mai noticed. "I just wanted to put us in the best situation. If I got cleared, I would've request that you be brought too."

The tiredness in his face was felt again by him. Maybe this new life so far, for all its complexities, had been kind to him so far, but that weight of another war still created the bags beneath his eyes, feeling his skull beneath skin.

"I don't think you _understand_, Mai."

She tilted her head at him. She didn't understand. "The way you fight. You're more than capable of keeping up with me to a-"

"That's not the point." He tightened his fist. Sure, the Geth might've not been as much of a threat as the Covenant of all things. But the eventuality of his old life: that he'd die fighting, having done nothing but, it had made him tired and old to almost a maddening measure. He had always been like that, ever since his first drop, his first lost squad, his first glassing. It made him almost insane to think his own mind pushed those thoughts to the corner, now only opened up by the impossible situation they were in. "I don't think I'd live if I kept up with you. I can't afford to do that."

A breath he was holding was let go as he unfurled his fist when it began to hurt, his nails digging into his palms.

"What?" He heard the confusion behind her word. What was the difference between fighting the Covenant his whole life or whatever this galaxy threw at them? It was if he had never left the UNSC then. As if he never escaped.

"What's the best for you, can't be the best for me." JD admitted with such a low breath, it seemed shameful. "I can't go where you go Mai, do what you do. Not for the reasons you do. At least here, with Shepard, it feels like I'm fighting for more than just to fit in to a groove."

He wasn't born to die.

His eyes were hazel. Mai had looked into his eyes weeks now when speaking, but now, she noticed the color. His eyes were a warm hazel, and, in that moment, they begged her. They begged her to understand that he was only a man. He couldn't be dragged wherever she went for the reasons she did.

He would go with her anywhere, she knew that of him, but it was unfair of her to put him in that situation. Especially if it degraded him, made him a black asset, beat him down to a life he had escaped.

She tilted her held down before the words left her mouth. "I'm sorry." Words she never spoken before in her life.

"Okay. Thank you."

The smallest of smiles, and his eyes turned to forgiveness as he turned away, back to Garrus and Tali. He was a simple man, with simple desires, simple respects and simple expectations. His family taught him no more, no less, than to expect the best of people, no matter how small it was. Some of the kindest people to JD had been people behind bars, trying to repent for their sins: some of the cruelest, those who had their freedom. This was Mai's best, and it was enough.

Deep down inside, in his heart, in some sappy part of his mind that he had to destroy and bury and eviscerate, the reason he served was more than just survival and need. The galaxy was at stake, yes, it felt. But he hadn't felt that scale, that horror, of the Covenant again. Their journey here and now had been of high ideals and of high principles. He was here because it was the right thing to do. That was what it felt like Mai was running from in some measure, and he wouldn't be who he was if he just let that happen.

* * *

A small crowd had looked at Tali and Garrus in the middle of their drills, even Wrex looking on, remembering when he had this training, over a thousand years ago.

Tali had breathed out exasperated as the pistol in her hand fumbled down onto the ground. A string of targets that Garrus put up had been too much momentum for her.

"Agh! Bosh'tet!" Tali's curse had drawed Mai and JD out from behind the Mako as Garrus reached down to pick up her pistol.

Garrus had tried to placate her, letting the coil air out on the gun. "Easy. I'm just benchmarking ya. See where your natural talent lies at."

Again, Tali had taken the pistol with a certain ferocity, Garrus going around her, kicking her feet into a proper position for shooting.

Being a warfighter meant more than squaring your feet and landing your shots. It meant a million other particulars that they could not afford to teach right now, or even could, but this was a start: shooting pop up targets. As far as special operators like JD or Shepard were concerned, it meant survival training, endurance regiments, mental and physical straining. The worst training had to offer was so that the war didn't seem that bad in retrospect. The very idea of sparring with Tali seemed dangerous.

She tried though.

"Don't teacup." JD pointed out. He didn't know if it applied to the fingers of Quarians or Turians, but he had to as he saw as she held the pistol. He picked up his own from his locker, coming over, standing side by side with her and holding his own handgun. The whiplash in his mind, from remembering what he had done with this not so long ago, had him silently gag in his throat before he returned himself to composure. "Wrap your fingers around the grip. Don't rest the gun on your palm. Recoil can get the better of you."

Garrus had nodded out, going back to his own bags and trying to find some spare gear for her.

"Okay." She nodded, changing the way she held her gun, aiming it down range, mirroring JD.

"Left eye dominant or right eye?" he asked.

"Left eye, I think."

"With pistols, use both eyes." Some of them there had yet to hear Mai speak, and she did, drawing the attention of the room to her. It didn't dissuade her own advice. "I use both eyes. Keeping both of them open allows you to keep a wider field of view. You can't afford to miss anything."

Tali expected Mai's first words to her proper to be scolding, mean, but instead advice had manifested and quite frankly JD had to agree. "You'll get used to double vision. Better to start early, if you're not combat trained."

The way the target spread downrange was out, it made sense: erratic, not patterned, numbers highlighted on them giving Tali an order to shoot. Mental training as much as finesse training. JD approved as he was tempted. Flicking his omni and interfacing with his pistol to a safer mode, it was obvious what he was about to do.

"Here, this is how I shoot."

Hitman hadn't seen JD shoot. No one in that hanger had except for those on Shepard's fireteam. For all his spookiness as a Navy SOF to Hitman, he had to prove it. This was a part of it as Tali stepped back to take a breather herself.

The M6C SOCOM he had known for his life as an ODST was not a last resort. It was a reliable option: the pistol that he went hunting Covenant with, not the one where he was on his back for. To admit to Mai that he had been better with a pistol was in part a humble statement. For him to say that he was good with a weapon to a _Spartan_ of all things meant that he was more than good.

He liked to think if he was born in the Old West, he would've been a gunfighting lawman as opposed to an outlaw, but the way he shot, it spoke to a violence that seemed so unlike the man. Calm professionalism exploded in a burst of attack.

The holster on his hip was almost ripped off his own belt as the M11 was seized by him, it hadn't even been at chest level before the first shot rang, one hand, extended out toward target one on the far left riding the floor. One shot, one hit. Target two had been the opposite side, he whipping around and finally gripping the pistol with both hands as his entire body shifted as if to accommodate only the act of shooting, the target down the one fraction of the second he had paused. Target three had been back on the other side, he snapping to the target as target four sat directly besides it, as if in one shot, two targets went down. Target six sat above them all, and, almost to prove that he could, he brought the pistol down to his hip, angling up, blasting a shot off that connected as his thumb mistaken felt for a magazine release to change out.

There was no need as he reholstered the pistol.

His back was turned to the crowd, but if he could've seen, the faces on the group would've been impressed.

"You expect me to be like that!?" Came Tali's filtered voice. He could almost here her eyes bug out.

He regretted not wearing gloves. His pistol was never meant to be fired off that quick and he felt the hotness on his palms. Turning to Tali, "No. But I just want you to know that I know what I'm talking about. Your turn."

Stepping back, she had been forced forward to where he stood, the same targets put back up. He felt a talon'd bump on his back and his throat again was in his lungs, but when he snapped over it had just been Garrus. The Turian knew what he had done, stepping back, his face grimacing. For a man like JD, he imagined, Turians were probably not high on the list of "people allowed behind his back". Still the two shared a look of apologies and understanding.

"I just wanted to say nice shooting."

"Hm." He bobbed his head as a thanks to Garrus, standing side by side with him as they watched Tali run clumsily through the same.

Looking over her form, it was as what they expected from an amateur, though there was one thing someone noticed as she did finish the target shooting, nearly ten times the length of JD's own time taking it.

"Leans in a lot. She's involved." It was Wrex from his crates, looking the Quarian over as she held her pistol at her side. "I know what weapon she'd be good with."

"SMG and a pistol?" Garrus guessed.

He shook his head disapprovingly, patting the weapon his back as if it was a handgun. It wasn't, it was just handgun sized to him as he brandished it to the ire of the Marines in there. "Nah. I've read this young one. I think she'll be best on a shotgun. I'll even teach her a few tricks with it."

A shotgun? Really?

Those present had thought otherwise. A Quarian like her able to take that recoil? Wrex had something more on his mind however. "You." He pointed back to Mai. "If we can't fight, how about we compete eh? Put maybe twenty more targets up and we'll use more ammo. Prove to me you're worth your size."

She considered either doing it or putting a bullet in the Krogan, just to be over with it. She declined however. "I don't have to prove anything to you."

"Heh."

The intercom rang out before anything else could transpire: _"This is Commander Shepard. A decision has been made. We are setting course for Therum."_

That was that then, the objective known: Liara T'Soni.


	16. 1-10: Not a Natural Formation

A/N: This chapter is an experiment to me on how I can translate pure gameplay sections into a chapter, and as you can see it's a terrible idea and I'll be slimming that down as we go forward. But yeah, we're covering Therum here, and, as per my own plotting, I'll bounce back to the Covenant next chapter, this mission's debrief, and then Wrex's loyalty thing. Then to Feros, probably.

Thanks for reading!

* * *

**1-10**

**Not a Natural Formation**

* * *

Best she could describe it: Like standing in the back of a Warthog that had been moving at a snail's pace. That was how she felt FTL in her feet on the Normandy. If she didn't feel it through the suit, she might've been liable to have some disorientation before she got used to this form of FTL. The idea of all FTL, at least, practical FTL, being dictated by the left behinds of a precursor race, it had left her thinking about interior security questions.

It was a lot to chance for galactic stability: What if someone had been able to control the Relays? Shut them off? Or make it so that their ships were the only ones able to use them? She wasn't a wide strategy planner, but she often thought of doctrine if only because that's what her mind defaulted to.

Mai had a lot to think about as Garrus and the Req officer fashioned Tali a battle belt out of some spare gear, JD fumbling around at the weapons bench with his pistol.

She was glad that it had taken them only a night to get past a funk, for them to talk out an issue that had manifested from Shepard. In truth, she didn't know if she could take a day of it. She was fine with tension between her and the other human crew members because they had never seen anything like her before, because they feared her as an unknown quantity. The tension that had been between her and JD though had been different, hit a different part of her than she had known.

The Normandy had made a pitstop at an outpost which Shepard had great contacts within to the surprise of the crew:

Pinnacle Station had been a Turian station during the Krogan Rebellions, now converted to a joint-species occupation all for the express purpose of something that Mai and JD had gone through during their observance period when they first arrived in that reality: Simulation training. For the good of not creating a show, Mai had stayed aboard as the Alliance crew members unloaded onto the station.

Its CO, Admiral Ahern, had been old friends with Shepard. "How's my apartment treating you?"

They traded pleasantries after a salute. "If I'm being honest, I lease it out to other officers Admiral. It's a popular spot."

"Hah! Smart woman." The gruff admiral had patted her shoulder. "What can I do for you?"

Shepard's request had been anyone who helmed a warship going off on some galaxy-wide adventure would have. Provisions, weapons, gear, equipment, and for the station's utilities to be used one last time by Alliance personnel. Ahern could do nothing but agree. Shepard's status as a Spectre had reached far and wide, even by the time she arrived in Argus Rho. Still, she had other claims to fame.

"Your Captain relies all on luck." JD had come aboard with Shepard, curiosity making him want to view the combat simulators where fireteams broke through missions and tasks, competing and training. As he stared down from the viewing deck down onto a magma field and an ongoing situation, a Turian had scoffed behind Shepard's back and to JD's.

He clenched most of the muscles of his body as he turned around to the flange of a Turian. His name was Vidinos, and according to him, he was really the only holding first place in all of the scenarios on the station. What JD could only take after that was that Jane Shepard had been first. She had, as part of the regimen of the N-Program, been posted here for a time. She made mincemeat of Vidinos's records. He was still sore about it, years later, as he bellyached to JD. Why him, he hadn't known, but Vidinos must've liked the sound of his own voice and JD hadn't made much of his own to intercede him.

To see a Turian more or less butt-hurt had helped calm JD. Calm him enough to rationalize the Turian as he waited for his own req package from Shepard to arrive from Pinnacle's cargo storage.

A thought crossed by his head as the team below made a mistake, pushing forward with momentum they thought they had. To see bodies drop on the battlefield had been a rookie's mistake, and pushing forward where they perceived weakness. The simulated pirates had come up behind them, out of cover and cut them down.

JD could only remember when he was a rookie, and, if he wanted to test something of himself at all in that world, here might've been the place, looking at the enemies they used.

"Hey." He chinned up at the Turian sulking. Apparently, he had been off duty. The ODST thumbed to the records board, eyebrow raised. When Vidinos twitched his mandibles, eyes blankly staring back into this human, he snorted.

"Sure, human."

A few hours later the Normandy had been away from the station, all stocked and fueled up better than Shepard had hoped for. When JD came back however, in his gear no less, those who had been familiar with the nature of the station had been intrigued and disappointed they missed out on the show. Most of them had missed, that is. Doc and Bannon of Hitman had been witness to an hour of JD and Vidinos running through several scenarios.

"The spook worth his silence?" Harris and the Req Officer had thumbed at a diligently working JD at the weapon's table. Ashley had waltzed over from her locker to Hitman's usual school circle by their own lockers.

"You guys doubted?" She said in a hushed toned, having seen the Normandy's Naval "shock trooper" in action at Eden Prime. There was a comfort in every step JD took in danger, as if he had done it a million times before.

Doc and Bannon had breathed out exasperated. "Ain't no doubt about it, lass." Bannon said in her sing-song accent.

Mai's super alert hearing had heard it, and, in some small part, had been sore she missed the display too, approaching him from his left as he sat on a stool, hunched over a pistol split in two: his pistol. To his side had been a rather sizable cardboard box. Even in the future such material had never gone out of fashion. She had thought they had been related, but didn't think too much of it, seeing his name on the markings of the box.

Reaching out with her right hand she had pressed fingertips on his shoulder blade as he pulled back from his tinkering, two soldering irons it seemed in his hands.

He looked up and saw a sight he never thought he could get used to seeing: a wolf-grey Spartan, her visor blackened out. The legends of the Spartans throughout the UNSC, even within the rivalry they had with the ODSTs, was perhaps more myth than man at that point in the war. To see one in the flesh, to know one, it had become an aspect of JD's life he didn't know he could deal with until it happened, in a world away from home.

She tilted her head at him, and he had placed his tools down.

Old habits died hard, and he tried his best to kill one today as he raised up another.

"I requisitioned some mods for my pistol." He said simply, calmly, as if for himself. In their reality, guns and weapons were simple, as far as the UNSC went. Even then though he had some idea how the Covenant Plasma Rifles, Carbines and Needlers operated. It was this focus on Mass Effect-based technology that had thrown him off. Gunpowder and lead had gone the way of mini-gauss cannons and ammunition that had been no more slivers of metal, superheated.

In a gunfight he would've bet his life on a gun that hadn't been hacked any day. It was what he was trying to work toward now.

The M11 Suppressor had been based on the Carnifex handgun, a popular heavy pistol in the parts of the galaxy that the Normandy had been proceeding to. An offensive handgun, born out of the slew of weapons projects that resulted in, among other things, Mai's current M-13 Raptor DMR, they were prototypes to the Normandy that made sense to be within the hands of its Naval spooks. What it meant to the two in question pragmatically is that there had still been a learning period to the manual of arms.

Something that JD, evidently, himself couldn't tolerate. It mystified Mai to see JD have the mark of aggravation on his brows, angled down, his cheeks sucked in through his teeth.

"Did the simulations cause this?" she asked.

The top half of his pistol had been gone: the laser module used for standard issue HUDs and cybernetics attacks that were focused through the guns. Some ammunition that could be fired out of firearms nowadays relied on the secondary ignition or marking agent, and the secondary barrels on a lot of firearms in that universe had been that. Wrex's shotgun could fire grenades, no less from its secondary barrel.

"Mm. Suppose." JD answered, taking in air through his nose, drawing away some bolts that he had pushed back into their position. The last thing he needed was to be losing components on that dark floor. The Normandy's lighting had nothing on UNSC interiors. JD had been half tempted to put on his helmet and light up VISR mode, even with the blaring work lamp on the table's surface.

He went back working on the gun, using his omni-tool to shave off tertiary metals as he, for all intents and purposes, was winging a gun modification that, if the Req Officer was looking, would've made him pale.

For a moment, Mai had thought that modifying such a prototype weapon of the Alliance would've reprimanded him in some way, but then again. She glanced down at her own armor, looking at the synthetic fiber harness that had become her chest rig in another life, salvaged from piloting equipment during her days as Sabre test pilot.

"You're in my light, Mai."

The ghost of Kat B-320 was in JD's words as Mai moved to a side of him that hadn't been obtrusive.

_"You know what Three-Twelve? Rough up Three-Twenty a bit today during field training. She got too nosy around Deep Winter again." _Chief Mendez had been the first of many in her service to the UNSC to use her personally to exert hurt on someone, and, Kat had been one of the first victims of it during training. Her nosiness, her lust for data and information sometimes got the better of her, and she was reprimanded for it. During the downtime Noble Team did have, briefly, between Sword Base and finding the Long Night of Solace, Kat had never paid Mai back for it. Never even mentioned the times where Mai was the executor of Kurt or Mendez. Downtime with Noble Team had been relatively painless for Mai, something she going to have to learn to get used to on the Normandy.

She hoped Kat had been okay; Carter and Jorge, and Jun as well. She hoped Emile had been still okay as well, for all of his bloodthirstiness that, for moments before she had become who she had been today, even made her think about her own inherent coldness. If she had shared anything with anyone in that world, it would've been with her fellow Spartans.

Still, it was them that had given her that name: Lone Wolf.

"Sorry."

"It's alright." He said, more of a breath than anything.

This man had changed her. She wouldn't have let him know, either by choice if she did know he had done this to her, or unconsciously as a Spartan, grown up to be a soldier, and not a person. It came in ticks like the movement of a watch, barely perceptible, twitches at a time. Though she was heading down a road she'd never been down before nonetheless. For all her life she remained a Spartan, and nothing more or less.

The bare month and a half since they'd arrived here, or rather, since JD had known her, it had changed her. Made her.

She worried the night before, as she strained the cot given to her behind the Mako that night for her rest, that she had failed him. Successes and failures, objectives completed or unfulfilled, her mind had operated within that frame and that frame alone. The only problem was that that tension between her and JD existed outside of it. Her mind had told her that she had lost an asset. A worry, a weight in her lungs, told her that she had put strain on something else. A friend? JD was her friend, wanted to be her friend. He made that clear what felt like a lifetime ago.

All she could do was offer him her best then, even if she didn't want to be here.

"Do you need help?"

JD looked at his omni. At least the mini-computer inside of the pistol had still been connected. "Nah. I don't think so." It took him a moment to even think on that. On what Mai offered. At first he had thought of her technical skills, and, in reality, they probably were still on the same level of understanding the manual of arms in that galaxy, so any help she would give probably wouldn't have gone that far in achieving his goals. Then came another thought, one that paused him as he looked down to the cardboard box to his left. An act of courtesy? Kindness? He replayed her words in his head and they sounded different to him to how she usually spoke. "Oh, uh, thanks anyway."

She nodded at him, unsure of what to do but just stay there, looking down on him. He would've offered her a seat but- "If you got out of that armor, I would've offered you a seat."

She looked to the Marines, some looking at them, caught, only to hurriedly look away.

"Commander Shepard just dropped us into Artemis Tau." Mai replayed the information relayed to the crew's omni. "I think we'll be deployed within the week."

FTL through the relays was instantaneous. Local space travel though had been more tedious. Nothing that hadn't been familiar to the two of them however.

"Have you not taken that off since we embarked?" She shook her head at JD cringed at the thought. Any drop where had to go days without even taking his helmet off had been Hell. Even when behind enemy lines he could've at least aired out or stripped down. With MJOLNIR it had been different. He thought of it as being trapped. She thought of it of as being her body.

"Until servicing." She answered him on when she would take it off. She decided when that was. JD hadn't considered that when he requisitioned the items to his side for her. Those sheets and pillows useless if she couldn't really use them in her armor. Still, he suppose in his most organic way, he was going to get her to break out of her shell, as cliché as that term felt to him.

He was a grown ass man. Twenty-six chronologically. Aged one hundred it felt like with the war. Spending time, under any other pretense, trying to get someone to open up as a person? It sounded wasteful to him while deployed, fanciful. Then again what they were doing now, where they were, exceptions were to be made and Mai had been JD's exception to a lot of things recently in his life.

He looked back to his pistol, holding it firmly in his hand as he aimed downrange toward no one in particular, still sitting. "Hitman might ease off us, if you get out of that, once and a while."

Behind her helmet, she pursed her lips unconsciously. She hadn't been in enough situations to observe people's faces. She hadn't spent much time in her life in general looking at people's faces in social situations, but like a memory she never knew she had, her face broke out of its stone visage with JD, even if he couldn't see. Pursing her lips had been concession. "We'll see."

For JD that had been enough tempting today as he shook his pistol in his hand.

It felt half as light and it pointed with a familiarity that had to be pointed out to Mai.

The oversized handguard had been gone, instead a piece of it molded and treated to a regular trigger guard, the compartment below the barrel where an LED had been was emptied out, stripping the gun further only for the laser on top to have been twisted and mounted upsidedown as if a LAM of a-

"Are you emulating your M6?"

Mai had gotten it right, JD nodding as he pointed with it. It looked ramshackle like any amount of Krogan weaponry, but he had been pleased with it. "Bare essentials. Barely any electronics. Just the action related to shooting, and just shooting, is left."

She flared her omni-tool, trying to target JD's pistol. When it had locked on an annoying amount of time later, it had trouble targeting subsystems of its profile, confused as to what exactly it could do. She did notice one thing.

"Overheating controls, you've turned off the safeties?" Normally that was a hack unto itself.

JD nodded. "ROF limiter, it's tied to. I can't work with that."

Mai, she was used to working within the confines of her battlespace. She never saw fit to break open Covenant weapons and jury rig them to some amazing new form factor or function. She was a fighter, and the rules of her game were the ones she followed. She didn't weld extended magazines for her MA5 to prolong trigger time, or break the sear on Battle Rifles to make them fully auto. Her lethality was simple, practiced.

She looked back at her M13 by her locker. To be fair she did need time to at least field strip it, but anything past that? The nuances of combat in that new reality had eluded her, for the moment, her physicality and brutality eclipsing her enemies for now. When the time came for her to fight a Biotic able to use their powers against her? Or for a tech to fry her weapons internally? She'd deal with it, just like she always did.

"Don't endanger yourself." There was a hint of concern, almost as discernable as a mote of dust in space in her words.

Frankly if he were to listen to that, he would've never have volunteered to come back into the service with the Alliance. Still, he got her point. "I'll try."

* * *

"According to Ahern, Captain Vidinos and Chief Durante took on one of the scenarios during shore time, waiting for shipments." Kaiden had made comment of it as he and Shepard ran through the data pads on said shipments and intelligence going forward.

Shepard peered up from the report of slavers and mercs even shying away in the Attican due to reports of the Geth. "Really now?" She had been busy asking around the station's officers if they had recognized Durante or Gul as prior competitors at the station after mission-related matters had been squared away. All had said no. They'd never seen them before, at least in Durante's case, until today. She thought they had been referring to him as being spotted with the shore party, not as having gone into the field.

Ahern hadn't been a part of the Admiralty, despite his service record. He preferred his service to keep him close to the fold and not politics, so he had never known of the humans that came from Altis, so, with no reason not to, he had allowed JD to take the simulators on Pinnacle for a spin with his guard captain.

"Here's some footage with Admiral Ahern's notes."

The tropical selection of the simulation had been her go-to pick for running through a situation. Bright sun and blue skies, even simulated, did much to alleviate her cabin fever on Pinnacle. No doubt Vidinos knew that as JD let him select. Take and Hold had been their scenario, a few points in the simulation having to be secured amidst enemy raids and patrols.

On Eden Prime, Shepard had known far and away that Durante had been more than capable of keeping up with her and setting his own pace, but now, from an observational view, she was allowed a level of study she herself was curious to see.

"Few of the Hitmen observed too, first hand, if you want their opinions."

Shepard had shushed Kaiden as JD took point and Vidinos covered rear section as they spawned in, JD getting used to Pinnacle's simulation. A few Alliance training vessels had used the same technology, pioneered here, so it was probably nothing he hadn't been too unfamiliar with.

If anything, he was more familiar with the situation.

Shock Trooper was right.

It was odd that JD had described himself as one. There hadn't been a proper "Shock Trooper" company in the Marines of the Alliance in quite some time, the last being from the Russian Federation at the turn of the 22nd century. Shock Troopers had been first assault infantry, if not behind enemy lines, their creation and usage meant a war of Blitzkrieg and attrition. A war that the Alliance didn't want to fight. The fact that JD had been one it was an interesting development to Shepard. She suspected Mai too had been one, but she was layered in more secrets, more training that went beyond her.

Went beyond JD disregarding cover entirely as he used the output from his submachine gun as his defense. Offense was the best defense, so as the training enemies ducked behind their own cover, they had missed JD rolling up to them, unprepared as he unloaded into them at almost point-blank range. The way he transitioned from target to target almost incredibly breakneck: as if he knew that it came down to miliseconds on the draw. Taking corners, holding angles, using the enemy's own knowledge of firefight doctrine against them… He had earned the title of Shock Trooper.

He was a quiet man, measured and collected. In battle though? Something inside of him screamed to let out as he knocked down a pile of crates on top of a simulated pirate, whipping his pistol out and popping a round into the man's head even as he was crushed.

He paused as he did it, frozen almost, looking down at what he had just done to the human pirate.

There hadn't been audio but Vidinos had yelled at Durante to get wise and keep his head in the game. The platform they were on was a hold point. JD had held onto his pistol, the several ways to enter their space a verging point for the enemy. JD had been remarkably proficient with a pistol as far as Shepard could tell, his shot placement and standoff capabilities telling the tale of man who had done this for a long time. According to what little biographical details, maybe his police father had showed him the ropes before he died.

Still that was a problem as the enemies piled up and rocket launcher wielding pirates showed up.

JD had seen a pirate aim his launcher at Vidinos, snapping around, taking aim from his cover and pulling the trigger. All Shepard had seen was the great exhaust of smoke come from it as he yelled at Vidinos to watch out. It had been too late as the rocket launched and he looked to JD to see what he said.

Vidinos had taken an incapacitating hit to his left as the pirate recocked his rocket launcher for another one, Durante doing nothing less, a grunt of anger emanating from his helmet, than throwing his pistol at the simulacrum. The hologram had twitched as the pistol phase through it, but it was enough time for the shock trooper to transition to his SMG and hose them down.

Vidinos had the winds and heart kicked out of him, he laying on the ground as JD completed on his own, the remaining eliminations they needed within the timeframe.

"Yeah, when the captain woke up, apparently, even with him finally getting back his record, wasn't too happy with Chief Durante."

Shepard had smirked at her once rival-of-the-month's form, collapsed on that simulated platform. "Carried over the finish line and with only a half-minute buffer between his record and mine? I figure old Vidy would be mad."

Kaiden, in truth, did not want to talk of Durante or Gul. He had been given Anderson's safety briefing on them, which had been summarized as: don't. Still he himself was still worried about them. Actively engaged with the Covenant? The fact they had to be restrained weeks ago? Something was up with them, and he figured Shepard had been engrossed. Still she was professional about it, sliding the video file to her personal folders and reconcentrating on the mission.

She looked across to her XO. "Kaiden, sectors big, and we've got several requests from the Admiralty and other officers about this region. Can you do me a favor and take the Normandy while we're planetside? Just scan and survey the sector. Take Hitman if you need to go planetside yourself. It'll do you good."

Kaiden nodded at the order. "Affirmative Commander. Will Pressly be an issue?"

She shook her head. "Well, you ain't Turian, Krogan, or Quarian, so probably not."

He had laughed once at that and Pressly's prejudices. It'd taken him sometime to grow okay with racist jokes. Racism hadn't been funny, but racist jokes he could live with as a Marine in a galaxy where Mankind hadn't been alone and humor was, generally, a baseline of social interactions. "Think he'd do better with a Drell or Salarian?"

"I think you know the answer, now get out of here."

"Aye ma'am."

"Good man. Dismissed." With a little more than a salute Kaiden had bowed out of her quarters, the flaccid face of optimism that Shepard had on dropped as her real one came out: She was tired. In truth her first night sleeping on an actual bed hadn't been well. If anything, she didn't want to go to sleep at all, not since her visions. There was a primal fear in her to not go to the darkness of her mind, to replay the visions that she saw: Of a machine tearing apart flesh for all eternity, or of men in black chasing her down in the urban industrial hell of a colony she had no idea existed. So instead of doing that she had spent time with those who also couldn't sleep.

She'd just recently spent time getting comfortable with Tali and Garrus, having walked down after setting course for Therum by way of Argus Rho and catching the group training her and accommodating her for field work, but before that, the night prior, she had chatted with each separately. Tali had been awake by intrigue alone, a passing comment by her letting Engineer Adams know that she had been more than technically proficient to work on the Normandy.

"She's not an issue?" She asked Adams that night.

"Hardly!" Adams said loud enough for Tali to hear, and she did, turning over from her console and seeing Shepard and him. He wanted her to hear. "I wish half my engineers were half as smart as she is. Give her a month on-board and she'll know more about our engines then I do!"

Tali didn't know how to respond, arms going up in a shrug. "Th-thanks?!" She shouted back to him. Tali had been headstrong, Shepard knew that the second she saw her toss a grenade at Garrus. Still settled down, there was still a young girl inside of her. To be running at all pistons weathered someone, and it seemed like working on a ship was calming. Shepard did wag one finger for Adams to lean in, and he did. "Is it really in our best interest for her to know?"

Adams grimaced. "You've gotta point."

Shepard leaned back, smiling instead. "Just keep it in mind Adams. I'm not worried." Moving over to Tali she tried to salute, but Shepard shook her head lightly. "No need, Tali, last I checked you don't got service tags."

Tali forced a few chuckles as she stepped away from the console, the drive behind her spinning smoothly. She was running diagnostics, finding patterns in the output spikes to increase efficiency. "I'm sorry, Commander, I just feel like I have to." She admitted as Shepard rose an eyebrow.

"You're a civilian, Tali." Shepard explained. "As far as I'm concerned, you're our guest."

Tali let her eyes drop down to her feet. "I suppose." As did her gaze, so did her voice.

"You alright?" Shepard reached her right hand across to her left, noticing Tali's tone.

"I really do thank you Shepard, I do. Travelling on this vessel is like a dream come true." Shepard went to say again, there was no need, but Tali went on. "If I was just on my Pilgrimage, any number of my people would kill to be here."

The Pilgrimage, the trial of Quarian right. The children of the Flotilla sent amongst the stars, only to come home when they became their best. Tali's was still on her own, and for her to save the Galaxy? Even that wasn't enough for her. They spoke, briefly, on the Pilgrimage, on Quarian culture and the composition of the Flotilla: why its ships were old clunkers and second-hand ships. However, their conversation that night before Tali's newly appointed shift ended had been of the Normandy itself.

"I'm used to seeing ships as homes, Shepard. And I don't think I'll get used to the Normandy."

"Oh yeah?" Shepard teased.

"No no!" Tali stammered. "The crew has been so nice to me, if not a little snarky," she thumbed to the doors leading to the bay and, most likely, Hitman. "But this ship, it runs so smoothly, so quietly…"

"Is it that packed on a Quarian ship?"

She shook her head. "It's not even that." She gazed at the drive core and how it pulsed. "I try not to describe ships as if living things, but, on the Flotilla, every ship hums, has a heart beat almost. To hear it silent means something has failed or shutdown, whether it be the core or the air filtration or something. Here, with this ship designed so smoothly, it feels…"

"Dead?" Shepard posed. It was a harsh word, but Tali nodded her head. "I know what you mean."

"Do you, Shepard?"

She nodded. "The most alone I've ever been in my life had a lot to do with silence," Shepard's own eyes gazed out, were empty, as she remembered her youth. "It was back on Earth, in the middle of a continent called Russia. All snow and trees and, well, I thought it was a good idea to hike across a land that made up over a third of the planet."

"Wow." Tali had brought her hand to her mask, over the blinking light that denoted her speech. Quarian translators were mounted in their suit directly. "I don't think I've ever walked even a city's length before I started my Pilgrimage. How old were you?"

"15."

"Keelah…"

Shepard had nodded, chastising her younger self, but still thanking her for having done it. "It was one night, during an important human holiday, that I was deep in the forest alone for what felt like the second week on end, and I had been unable to make a fire. So, well, I just crawled into my sleeping bag and rolled into a hole for warmth." The Russian Taigas were dead. Nothing but wood and snow and the stars above. "When I closed my eyes, I didn't see a difference between that and opening my eyes. I was just alone with nothing but myself and the silence."

There was a quiet moment between the two of them, standing, Shepard going to the railing and leaning as Tali remembered another thing. "They warned me about that."

"Hm?"

"Being alone." She started, recounting the last lessons given to her by those who had returned from their Pilgrimages. "The galactic community is not kind to Quarians, and we don't often keep up communications with others on Pilgrimage. They prepare us to be alone for a long while… Especially if they never find anything worth bringing home."

"Are there those who never come back?"

Tali nodded barely. A fear in her glowing eyes. She really did want to do her people proud, even if it meant going on a galactic adventure against a Spectre, with a Spectre.

There were those Quarians, frustrated, idealistic, or some sort of extreme, that saw fit to never return, or to strike out on their own from the Fleet. Some simply just wanted a home of their own.

"I promise you, Tali, we'll do our best by you. If there's anything you'd need, please tell me."

Looking at Shepard was like looking into the heart of humanity. Nuanced and unique, introspective and yet outgoing, she saw the galaxy full of, not aliens, but just people. Tali did not have much experiences with humans, and what so far, before the Normandy, had been bad. Though it had been enough to deduce that Shepard had indeed been a good woman.

She left Tali that night, hoping that Durante ordered extra bedding. Tali had her own fold out cot and she didn't want her to deal with just that. She would've checked too, but Gul had been in the shadows, leaning against the wall between the Mako and her and Durante's lockers. Shepard didn't quite have it in her tonight to see if she was sleeping in her armor. She had thought it had only been her armor at first, but when she saw the helmet tilt at her, she knew that Mai had not changed out.

Garrus had been her destination then, next, the man using an open bench on the opposite side of the bay. Upon seeing her he too had saluted, getting up from his squat and leaving an assault rifle half open. "Commander."

For Garrus it was different. He seemed set in his ways of military. He couldn't help it, he was Turian.

"What're you working on there, Officer Vakarian?"

Garrus relaxed, looking to his jumbled mess of a gun. "If you may Commander, I'm off duty right now, so Garrus is fine, and…" He motioned to it. "One of my buddies back in C-Sec gave me a mod for my rifle, I'm just installing it and swapping in for the new ammunition you ordered."

"I also take it you can't sleep?" Garrus's mandibles flared momentarily. "Yeah, me too."

Garrus had to admit in a breathy sigh. "Only Turian on a human ship? Chasing after a rogue Spectre? I'm a little stressed, admittedly." They spoke in hushed tones, Wrex flopped over down the way on nothing more than a padded mat. He seemed comfy enough as he snored like a beast. They didn't want to risk being the cause of him waking up

"Don't be." She motioned for him to sit down again and continue working, she pulling up one of Hitman's lawn chairs that they brought with them. "You seem to know a thing or two about weapon mods."

She had watched Garrus get back into it, his confidence in aligning circuitry and wires admirable as when he did complete the modification, it all seamlessly clicked back together, he turning the gun on and off several times as he verified, he did do it correctly.

"In the Turian Navy, they make us work our way up to Mass Effect-based weapons. Start us on our old, combustion rifles."

"Like that one?" Shepard thumbed at her hunting rifle, mounted above the lockers. Garrus nodded.

"Make us know ins and outs, how they work, why they worked, and why they were replaced. I had to get really damned good at calibrating weapons, and, I guess I just kept up with it into C-Sec."

"How old are you, if I can ask?"

"In human years? I think uh… I think the translator can interpret." His mouth moved and sound came out that didn't match. "Twenty-seven."

Shepard had chuckled. "You've kept your twenties awfully busy."

Garrus had rolled his head, putting the rifle back in his footlocker. "If I'm being honest, I'm just following my father's path a bit… The only problem is I never knew how he dealt with it."

"Hm?"

One arm of his leaned on the table, holding his head up, in the same move taking off the HUD unit on the side of his face and onto the table. Shepard considered using one of those, but otherwise she'd been tempted to not wear her helmet. He was tired and frustrated, but more frustrated.

"The red tape of C-Sec. It's why I'm glad to be working with you now, Commander."

He and Pallin had held rather similar view points, and yet they hadn't seen eye to eye. "Tape has to be there for a reason."

"Oh, trust me, I do know. We had to take down a corrupt cop just the other day." Garrus paused, looking blankly at that clear table, seeing instead his desk at C-Sec. "It was easier, when I had a beat."

"Yeah?"

Garrus nodded. "I had my route, knew the people on it, understood why I walked those streets. The rules were simple, and the laws I could understand. Everything above me was just politics and public officials."

"But you're no longer a beat cop?"

Garrus had sighed. He wasn't. "When you work your way from the bottom, you see the changes, inches at a time. See what bought out politicians influenced what laws, or what businesses benefitted from what ordinances. Some people were above the law inherently, and if brought under it, well, they were treated differently by us…" It was late, on the Normandy, at least in regards to shifts and their native times. "I don't see justice done nowadays. Not before my very eyes."

Justice. A word that Shepard fought for, beyond many things. She thought herself liable to it, but what she had done for it was the very reason. She called in favors, went borderline AWOL with a group of other N7s, and gunned down scientists related to Cerberus in broad daylight. All for what had happened to her at Akuze: for all the men and women she lost.

"The line's there for a reason, and, well, when you step over it, do what you think is right…" Shepard remembered a month and a half ago, gunning down people who had no chance to fight back. Her dreams and nightmares were of the looks on their faces. "You might not come back over the same."

"Someone has to cross it." Garrus had told himself.

"But not the Spectres?"

Garrus had chuckled. "Nothing against you, Commander."

Shepard had smiled in turn. Her new status hadn't felt changing to her, the responsibilities on her shoulders she would've borne with or without the Spectreship. "We do things, on this mission, by the book, by the rule of law, Garrus. It's how we become better than Saren."

"I know, Commander, I know. There's just something inside me that believes its simpler than that."

There was a conflict in every heart, between good and evil. Garrus Vakarian had it within his own. Shepard hadn't been naïve. She had fought this same battle before, and continued fighting it still. What she could only know now is that, maybe, Saren fought this battle and made him choose the Geth, the Reapers, over anything else.

"Any war stories?" She asked timidly.

Garrus shook his head. "Just patrols and pirates, and, well-" Garrus looked her up and down for a reason that eluded her. "Maybe when we're more comfortable we can talk more candidly."

"Of course. I do mean to get to know my crew."

Garrus had smiled for her, and she was glad he did as she left for the night. "I look forward to it."

* * *

"Any reason we're not hitting Therum first in the cluster?" Joker had asked his new boss as she sat on the arm of the empty seat that Kaiden had usually occupied in his off hours. Shepard had been running through reports on her omni, updating by the second it seemed.

"When a ship like the Normandy is allowed free reign of the galaxy, people tend to call as if someone won the lottery. Guess my number came up."

Admirals she had known in history and from reports up and down the galaxy had made themselves known in her inbox. Kahoku. Mikhailovich. Hackett. Lindholm and Singh. Flag officers of the Alliance fleets had reached out to her on wires both official and private. She felt like an errand boy, and, to be fair, it was known she never did have the heart to say no to helping her peers out. Even this far up the professional ladder it showed.

Joker had snorted as he simply set course for Athens, a system on Artemis Tau's north western edge. "I just figured that the Admiralty knew that you had better things to be doing."

Shepard couldn't complain that she had become the Alliance's go-to woman based on a technicality of her Spectreship. "Did you know that Ahern, back at Pinnacle Station, used me as a guinea pig for his simulations?"

Joker had been more concentrated on tapping away at the Normandy's controls, but he listened. "Let's say I don't know." He didn't.

Shepard nodded to herself, remembering. "There's a mission, in the sim, that replicates his real-life tasking during First Contact on Shanxi. Real dicey, no sane commander would ever put their troops in that position." No cover, a lot of enemies, and no support. "One day, my smartass told him that I could take it."

"I'm sure you could've Shepard." Joker had said in a deadpan.

"Set me up with no safeties, after I bet my life against it. He bet his apartment." Right now she had been getting quite a bit of personal income by leasing it out to other officers or N7s for either staging points for Ops or actual leaves, but it vaguely taught her that her particular peculiarity of saying yes to much of anything asked of her was advantageous when seen her way. "Point I'm trying to make is I like Admirals owing me a favor."

"And not doing it out of the goodness of your heart?"

"Ain't no moral battle I'm fighting when an Admiral wants me to check up on some survey transmitters. Especially when I know he has some N7s underneath his command."

"You building an army?" Joker turned to her finally, leaning further back in his seat. "My brittle bone butt not good enough for you?"

She had commanded three hundred men and women once. Spartans, as one of them liked to say. In truth they had been far away from those trained soldiers of ancient history and mythos. Spartans didn't exist anymore, and especially not on Elysium, where that many people had been the militia and off-duty soldiers she had been able to rally together to save the colony. Each one of them deserved the Star of Terra, but in the end, she was the only one who got the reward, the recognition. It was why a lot of her extra funds did go back to veterans' associations on Elysium.

"Any help we can get is needed, Moreau. Besides," She had gone to apt his shoulder, but pulling away for obvious reasons as he twitched to avoid. "I'm sure you'd just steal it if you didn't think I was using it best."

"Hey," he dragged out the word, rubbing his scruffy chin. "Stealing the Normandy is a one-time thing for me." As was how he got the position as pilot in the first place. "And besides, stealing is a strong word. I like to use the word "temporarily extracting"."

"Then I guess I'm just "temporarily extracting" some assets for us so we can make life a little easier for us."

She could've talked to Joker for hours, but then again that was more on her part than anything. Her genuine interest on the man's upbringings, his difficulties, and his perhaps less than well-timed humor had been lethargic as she started doing her rounds of the ship. Three decks were all she had to claim as her own, so it was, at least on her soles, relatively painless. Starting from the top down, she made mental note this was how she was going to do this. On her last ship she had reserved her rounds to only the Marine sections, but it was no matter to her here. Too many times an officer had lost touch of what they had been before commission, raising in the ranks and leaving the men that helped them behind.

It was a lesson learned in two parts: In one part, when she had been nothing more than a salt of the Earth lieutenant, still charging pirate positions and breaching doors with her men: seeing other officers leave her and their men behind. On another part however? Something more personal.

She glanced at the paracord on her left wrist. A bracelet, stolen, a long time ago, but only fairly recently officially, rightfully given to her. It had been her father's.

John Shepard had been steely man for as long as Jane Shepard had been alive. Cold, but not inherently so. He had been a veteran of First Contact, and, she had long known, whoever the man had been beforehand was not the same man that emerged. Still, distance had always been a problem to the Earthborn Shepard, she staying behind on Earth as her Father and Mother took to the stars with the Alliance, she taken into the care of a private school in California. Naturally, it was for her safety.

Still, and it seemed all so logical to Shepard as she approached thirty, that what she had done was a natural consequence of being emotionally distant from parents gone for a good portion of the year. That is what she liked to think, to justify her running away and travelling the Earth as a teenager.

If she had a child, and if she still served the Alliance with such dedication, she too would've probably left them on Earth, or, at least, planetside somewhere. For their safety: a safety they wouldn't understand.

Before she left, she had taken her father's paracord bracelet, left at their home, out of pure malice. Now she kept it just to remember that she had a father, and a mother, with a fairly repaired relationship. It was a reminder that if she was to be a mother to her men, she was going to be a good one.

"Normandy still doing good?" She stared out the viewing windows of the cockpit, seeing the stars go by.

"With me behind the wheel? Bet your ass, commander."

"I'm sure Adams appreciates it."

"Well, he's got that Quarian wiz-kid down there. And you sure about having one of them down there toying with the Alliance's newest toy?"

Shepard licked her teeth, hearing the same concerns parroted up and down the ship in hushed towns. Perhaps not in exact words, but in similar ones: Between Garrus, Wrex and Tali now, for some inexplicable reason, being here with them now on what otherwise would be a highly classified mission. She too still thought of it, but Udina had been worried long before her on this. So much so that he had already forwarded dossiers on each. What she had read had been more than enough to not worry.

As far as Alliance and C-Sec were concerned, Tali was no more than just a young woman, caught up in adventure. Even with someone like her the Alliance and C-Sec had more of a dossier established than Chief Durante and Chief Gul.

"You smoke, Joker?" Shepard went to the Extranet marketplace as she fiddled with her omni. He shook his head.

"I've got enough health problems before putting my lungs into it, why?"

"Chief Durante req'd some through me. And, well, I don't smoke. Was just asking for advice if you had any."

"Ah right, the spook." As far as Joker was concerned, whatever the deal was with them, he wouldn't stick his nose in it. "I think I've said like, two words to him, and that was back at the Citadel, him passing through the airlock for a smoke before we disembarked."

"Good morning?" Shepard guessed.

"Yeah…" Joker had known a few pilots who smoked. Most of them done so just because they were pilots: the idea, the image of a pilot, with a bomber jacket, smoking cigarettes like old American bomber crews during World War II still persisted, that far into history. He never had time in the academy for such vanities. Still, he knew what they smoked now that he thought about it. "Lucky Strikes are popular."

"Hm. I'll look into it."

"Why don't you ask the big one? They seem to be close."

"Chief Gul?"

"Yeah."

"Are they?" Joker had shrugged in his seat, bringing up the inside cameras looking at the bay. A few Marines at present had been giving Tali PT. For her worth, she on her stomach dead from pushups it looked like. She was serious about being trained, after running herself dry on pistol exercises. She wanted more. Wanted to be brought up to speed as fast as she could. So, she had gone on PT with the Marines. There was a thirst in her throat, and it spoke a language of combat. On the bottom corner of the view had been Durante and Gul. Joker had rewinded the footage, memorizing when he had picked up on some tics of them. He rewinded all the way back to a few hours prior, Durante on a bench fiddling with his weapon.

Gul had approached with a touch of the shoulder, her hand pressing on it as he looked up to her. He then fast forwarded to after that: "Very handsy, aren't they?"

Not in the traditional sense as Shepard observed. "That's sign language, innit?" Joker tipped his chin up, Gul and Durante tucked behind the Mako's shadows, close, almost knee to knee in their sit, as Durante made motions with his hands that Gul replicated.

"You usually peek on the crew like this?" Shepard had peered over Joker's shoulder. He again, apathetically shrugged.

"I'm responsible for a degree of the ship's safety, so if there's aliens onboard, I might as well have a look at them."

"Chief Gul ain't an alien, lieutenant."

"She definitely ain't human." For the next few moments Joker had fast forwarded through footage, of them sharing a language without words, of gentle touches of shoulders and bumps of arms. They kept to themselves, Durante coming out of the shadow of the Mako from time to time to teach help direct Tali and, at a certain provoking, keep up with PT standards with the rest of Hitman who were going at it. The area hadn't been large, but they made it work as Shepard could just begin to smell the sweat of Marines in her mind.

She wanted to be down there with them, truth be told.

"I mean, I guess it balances out. I've got glass for bones and she's built like a Krogan."

She chuckled. "Then come join us for PT, Joker."

"Someone's gotta pilot the ship." Parting words to Shepard as she stepped away, the moment she being out of the cockpit her new ship XO having come up her butt. She was in an interesting position: both CO of the ship and its Marines, but vetting for a new Marine CO would've taken time she didn't have. She glanced at the N7 comm channel again. In truth she probably could've picked any one of them to come along with her, but then again this ship had been too small for two. That and she didn't know if the Chiefs had been N-graduates at all.

"Commander," Pressly had started, meeting her half way through the operation's console hallway and to the CIC, walking with her. "Alliance command forwarded us some survey locations. Minerals and things like that. Should I add them to systems we're hitting?"

She'd seen the reports. Even the ones the censors didn't want her to. The Alliance had been building up arms and fleets like nothing else in the last month, taking out credit and loans for material and men. For what, she at first didn't know, but against it made her think of the Chiefs. They were the future. They had to be: creations of military theory that had, in the words of one of her favorite historical authors, become too weird to live and too rare to die. Prototypes for a new type of Alliance soldier that wasn't beat back by Turians or muscled by pirates.

"As long as I get our finder's fee on requisition spending, sure." Unofficial, but that far into her career she knew the politics of a ship captain finding something useful for the Alliance. Pressly went to open his mouth, but no sound came up, shutting himself up before he said something he might've regretted.

Rounding the center consoles she had found the commander's stand again, and, Turian as it was, she was getting used to standing there to input commands throughout the ship. "Feeling alright with me being captain Pressly?"

The older man had seemed off guard, coughing into his uniform's glove as he stood by his own console. Some of the crew members chuckled. Shepard had been so amiable compared to Anderson down to the point of conversation. Though that was her danger in a way that kept much of the crew working hard and to the letter as if Anderson had still been captain. To see Shepard angry was rare in that setting, whereas Anderson was always.

"I know you'll be more than capable, Commander."

"That's an assumption, not an opinion, Pressly." Coy as she was she had mounted the commander's deck for a moment, seeing estimated time for their current plotted course. Therum, after a few stops, would've been reached in about six days. As far as galactic time went no more than an afternoon out.

"Ma'am?"

"Come on, you speak freely enough when airing complaints about our guests, why not about me?" This was her language, as if she was flanking and pressing attacks in battle. She'd heard it from Pressly the moment the three aliens had been brought onboard. He had been the first to voice some apparent surface-level concerns that hid a more ethnocentric view on them, and he had made comments on them since they departed the Citadel. Racism on Earth had been so easy to overcome when the Turians started coming for them, at that point Turians saw humanity as, ironically, humanity did now: without division between race, gender, or ethnicity. They were all going to die anyway.

Common enemies, common goals, it unified people more often than not, that much Shepard had seen in her life. On colonies where families were divided like Romeo and Juliet, or farmers and homesteaders fought big businesses, those type of arguments and civil conflicts went away when the Batarians start landing.

In war, humanity was unified, and quite frankly Shepard thought it a deep irony. The wars and conflicts that defined people like Pressly, like Ashley Williams and her entire bloodline, like Anderson or Hackett, were the ones that had brought mankind closest, and yet set them apart and away from the galactic community.

"You must have concerns, knowing my record. You would know best Pressly." He was there. Over Elysium, answering Shepard's SOS call.

He did have concerns. Over the Butcher of Torfan. The prodigal daughter of humanity come to save the galaxy being his CO. "I'm an old man, Shepard. I might not be able to keep up with your pace, is all."

"Tempo." Was all she responded, softly, finger pointed at him in one stroke, before it bounced up again and again as if she was directing an orchestra. "Tempo. Tempo. Tempo."

"Commander?"

"I'll teach my song and dance, make it so we all can get it. Everyone has a part. Most people already know it, but…" She sucked in filtered air through her nose. She was doing that thing again. Where she spoke as if she was comfortable. A charismatic leader with scripts written for her by the natural publicist that was herself. Every word she spoke was ripe and right as rain. She spoke the Commander Shepard, and that hadn't been who she was. She held the sides of her console tightly. "I don't tolerate racism on my ship, Pressly. I deemed them capable crew members and any failings due to them or as a consequence of their presence here are my own. Judge them as you would anyone else. If that judgement is racial in nature then I presuppose you to reconsider."

The change of her voice, the tone of it, it made the midshipmen and crew pause. It made Pressly blink in consideration of his next words. They were crucial, he realized, almost as if he was underneath gunfire.

"I'm sorry if I gave off any impression of that Commander… It must just be old wounds."

She smiled sweetly at him. "Of course, Pressly. But you must understand why I might be coming off strong on this. We've got a long road ahead of us."

For some of them, far longer than they had realized.

Chakwas had been on the CIC deck, on her way back down after otherwise taking a walk to stretch her legs. She tapped her cheek appreciatively of Shepard, approvingly as Pressly's own gaze caught hers. With as much of a flash of an eyebrow raise, the doctor simply let him know that he was on his own.

"Yes ma'am. Of course ma'am." Pressly had hurriedly responded, and with that, Shepard had been more than pleased as she pulled her shirt straight, glancing at their current course.

"Hit those points of interests and report back to me. We don't want to keep Liara waiting too long."

"Aye ma'am."

She had stepped off the platform to find Chakwas waiting, "We going the same way Commander?"

"Appears so." Shepard offered a hand for Chakwas to take lead as they walked down the steps from the command deck.

Shepard had rubbed the back of her neck on the way down. In charge hadn't been the same as knowing what had been best, and, as far as she equated, any orders from a Doctor had been something that fell along the lines of best. Karin Chakwas was one of the few people in her life who knew how to give that best advice, and so she respected her, beyond what professionalism could be read on her dossier, from what she knew of her so far. "I apologize, Doctor, that I haven't introduced myself proper yet."

Chakwas could only chuckle, fingertips at her lips as they arrived on the crew deck, only to shortly slide back into her Medbay. The memory of Nihlus, a burnt body on one bed, as she laid unknowing besides him, had bombarded every sense that memory could use. Even that one: the one of her visions, the nightmare and horror of the Reapers. Even the Geth feared, if they regarded the Reapers like that: enough for Saren to manipulate them. She glanced at the trash bin, just in case the memories came back strong.

"Oh it's no issue, Commander. God knows that we've been occupied." She had settled herself back into her seat at her desk, Shepard, after a gestured ask, allowed to sit on the one of the bay's beds. "I could've gone anywhere in the Alliance, from a private practice among the colonies to one of our research labs, and yet, it seems I've come into the good fortune of remaining here."

There was no satire or sarcasm in her words. In a way, Shepard understood it. She too had never dreamed of becoming a lieutenant commander in the first place if it brought her away from her men and women. To trade in her combat rig for dress blues, it soured her thoughts everyday when she was offered positions among the Fleets.

"This crew, Commander, it's certainly the most interesting one I've ever been a part of…"

"Oh yeah?"

Chakwas flared her nostrils as a hint of a nod appeared, her eyes rolling a bit as if looking at a list above her. "Humanity's First Spectre, the renown Lieutenant Commander Jane Shepard, leading a crew made up of a special forces Marine unit onboard of a ship, first of its class, piloted by a man whose bone could very much be compared to glass, all while taking on companions whose only real relation to her is a sense of justice over the actions of one villain: Saren Arterius."

"You make me sound like a hero of a story, that way." Shepard would know. Documentaries and dramas based on choice sections of her career had made it to market. Not that she ever watched. Interviewed yes, in order to fit some narrative: making her out to be some plain Jane, any-man hero that anyone could aspire to if they reached inside themselves.

"I wouldn't know the feeling," Chakwas responded lightheartedly. "But it's better to aspire to that than anything else, wouldn't you say Commander? Admittedly you're living the type of life I imagined would come with enlisting."

"It's tiring." Shepard had curled her lower lip, considering asking the good doctor for some sleep aids at some point. "What kept you in the line?" In the line of duty that is, on active warships liable to be attacked at any moment.

Same reason Shepard was there. "Oh, I suppose some sense of duty to our servicemembers. God knows that for every one of Lieutenant Alenkos in the service, there are five Private Jenkins, and the latter is liable to be patched up every other day. The Alliance needs its doctors, especially if we're expanding at the rate we are."

Some maternal part of her, perhaps, the air of Naval service noble within Chakwas that made Shepard's own idealism measured. There was a fondness with Jenkins mentioned. They both were glad he survived Eden Prime, and, hopefully, he had known that all his excitement for his first mission was brought home to him, literally, to temper him.

"Well, got a read on our current crew, Doctor? Don't suppose we're all up on our vaccinations?"

Chakwas had moved some of her greying hair behind her ears, green eyes glancing at her computer. "I've been waiting on updated guidelines on Quarian procedures, just in case Miss Rayya is in need. However, communique from the Migrant Fleet has always been finicky at best, only now that our guests from Altis are among them."

"Ah. Good. I'm not quite sure on bringing her out on away missions, but we'll see when we pick up Liara."

Chakwas had been thankful that Therum had been, at least, days away. "And, asides from her… I do have medical dossiers and bios from the rest of the crew. Garrus had his file transferred from C-Sec, Commander Ryder sent them in prior to their arrival, and even Wrex had submitted to my inquiries more than willingly."

"I presume doctor-patient confidentiality is in place?"

Chakwas gave a smirk. "Of course, but rest assured all peculiarities in anyone's medical record here is well accounted for and within lines… Well, all except for two people that is."

"The Chiefs?" Shepard wagered a guess.

"Chief Gul, yes." Chakwas confirmed, the other name had surprised her however. "Sergeant Lavoie is being difficult, but I presume he has it well in hand."

"Lavoie?" Shepard had yet to be fully acquainted with all of her crew, but she knew who he was as Chakwas clarified.

"Decker, he was the man attending to Nihlus here, when you woke up if you recall."

She did recall a man inside of a bubble, suited up in all white tending to Nihlus when she came to.

"He's bald, correct? Pale guy?"

Gently, she nodded once. "Decker, or, rather, the Marines like to call him Doc, he went to university with me. Generally, we were both on the same career path but… Well, I don't know if you've gotten the time to look through their dossiers, but Decker went through some difficulties that might've stricken him as an irony."

"Would you mind if I inquire what?"

Chakwas only carefully shook her head. "Cancer."

"Ah."

According to statistics, Chakwas was halfway through her life, despite her age. She had a lot more living to go through, but, to see a colleague have his own expectancy curtailed, it gave perspective.

"We were both there for Shanxi." Shepard's eyebrow rose, surprised. "His treatment put him out of a degree in the medical field, took him out of academia a year before we both would've graduated, but he found his way into the Alliance eventually."

"Do you trust him enough to have him back in the lab?"

Chakwas had nodded softly. "He's certainly not out of practice. Whereas I work in medbays or field hospitals, his medical expertise has been out there in the field. He's just as competent as I, and, given our crew makeup, just what we need."

"Any particular reason?"

"Asides from the fact we are at capacity? Nothing in particular. I might be busy attending to Joker and his condition somedays, so having a spare medical professional on call would be more than beneficial. Add onto the fact that we now have several biotics on the field team that need their supplements and general checkups, well…" She drew off before returning. "I perhaps work best under pressure, with full hands, but having help will always be welcome."

That Shepard more than understood. As was why she had taken the new members of her team on at all.

"I presume he's fine then, being just short of a doctor?"

Chakwas had agreed, but had led the conversation on. "I still have to account for you, Commander. Keep you under the scope in regards to those… visions, you had after Eden Prime, to makes sure you haven't sustained any neurological damage."

"Is there much of a procedure to account for prophetic visions, Doc?"

"Hallucinations, maybe-"

"Hey, Doc, ain't none of what I saw was a hallucination." Shepard had been on the defensive almost too fast, Chakwas noting. The good doctor had conferred with Anderson on Shepard's vision, immediately prior: On the machine genocide and then the vision of men in black chasing her through a city unknown in the Alliance, and, surprisingly, Anderson had put his faith in Shepard. Those visions were something.

"Oh, I don't mean to imply that. I meant to say that you'd be liable for headaches, an overloaded brain, in laymen's terms. I can prescribe you some painkillers for that."

Shepard had realized how terse she had sounded at that moment, bringing herself back in with a cough. "Some sleep aids, would be nice."

Chakwas had kindly agreed, gesturing to one of the cabinets. "We'll start you out with Chamomile, Commander, before I prescribe any actual medicinal solutions." Tea. Something Shepard had wish she knew more of as she got the kettle and the tea packet out, readying it for a cup.

"Honey and sugar around?"

"Then you'd be ruining it." Chakwas had chided, leaving Shepard to brew a simple cup of tea.

* * *

A few standard galactic days had gone by for the Normandy as the Artemis Tau cluster had been picked through. Survey beacons sent out and curiosities of the galaxy brought up. A mineral deposit tagged by the Alliance surveyors confirmed and reserved for pickup by another ship, missing drones and beacons collected and verified with their data, and the mythology of the galactic neighborhood brought to bear.

A flag brought up, from Pharos in the Athens System, bore a mark Garrus had recognized after a survey drone had found an abandoned outpost on its tin surface. The cloth and fabric had been frozen stiff, but it was visible in its design:

"I recognize this. Magna. One of the colonies out here in this neighborhood." Shepard had stood over it as Garrus explained, "Few hundred years ago, just before we found the Citadel, the colonies of the Hierarchy became… distanced."

Mai had been in earshot on the other side of the Mako, on guard over JD as he had wrapped himself in his own arms against the wall and nodded off. There was simply nothing for him to do, past browsing the Extranet for the umpteenth time reviewing history. Just as he had in his old life, he had done so now: sleep.

"Distanced?"

Garrus had nodded at Shepard's question. "When you spread as big as you do, unchecked by the Council, the colonies furthest away from the core sectors tend to become disenfranchised. Back in the day, local chieftains saw fit to draw away from the Hierarchy. When the Hierarchy didn't let them, well, it became a Civil War." Garrus had seen his history before him in that flag. "I'd recommend jettisoning this in a cargo pod and leaving it with a beacon. Have one of our patrols pick it up after we send out a message."

"I'll see to it." She said promptly, that exact thing being done as, a few hours later, a Turian ship had sent its regards.

When it left though, it left behind thoughts for Mai. Humanity only had itself to compare to, the Covenant, for all of its genocidal might against the UNSC, leaving no real indication to their own internal operation as a galactic civilization. It comforted her, if only in understanding, that even aliens had growing problems she very intimately knew.

She wondered what that war looked like. She wondered if there hadn't been someone like her before in that galaxy. The Krogan Rebellions, the Rachni Wars, she had studied them, looked for patterns she saw in herself, but, in the end, came to the same answer now as she did in her old life: That she was alone. Perhaps not in physical attributes, for she was the follow up to the Spartan-IIs, and god knows that she wasn't the only Spartan who had made mincemeat of Insurrectionists. She was alone in circumstance.

Shepard had made to return to the command deck, but not before glancing over at Tali being run raw by PT hosted by the Marines of Hitman. Colorful bunch, even by Shepard's standards, but good. Good to her, and, apparently, good to Tali as she saw the beads of sweat drop on the inside of her visor as she was doing another rep of pushups before another go at sprints. Blood was on her tongue, but in a good way.

She didn't return up to the deck before, especially, finding an opportunity to talk to Chief Gul alone. Still in her armor.

Cloaked in shadows, the grey of her armor didn't help her figure form into a shape of a person. She glanced at JD, but Mai had almost instinctively leaned to obscure. "Commander." Mai had greeted, and Shepard had found her instead.

"Have you not taken that off since Eden Prime, Chief Gul?"

Mai shook her head. "I've been trained to operate with this armor system for months at a time."

Her voice. That's all that Shepard had to remind herself that Mai had been a woman, a human. It was a forced voice, it felt to her, not natural. It seemed too much defined by the sounds of military words and phrases, strong and punctual, deep in her throat. She wondered, frankly, what it sounded like if she laughed.

"You don't have to, Chief Gul. Last I checked the Normandy isn't currently engaged in combat action, and we won't be for another day or so… That is if it comes to that."

"Understood, Commander." Mai had offered no inroads to conversation, her arms held behind her back, the black visor of hers the only thing Shepard could look at. She wondered how many people had seen this as their last sight? She wondered many things, and she wanted to ask so much of this woman.

"You seem, uncomfortable, Chief Gul." Shepard looked around for the sheets that JD had requisitioned for her, but none were spread. "I really do recommend armoring out and off. I don't know where you've been deployed on, but we're in no hurry, and your armor system seems easy enough to take on and off, from what I observed."

Again, and again, she was told to just take the armor off, and yet it went against everything she had been comfortable with. She looked back to JD, as if he was to chime in, but he made no such comment. He was asleep, peacefully, thankfully, for once.

"Am I being deployed for the retrieval of Dr. T'Soni?" Mai posed instead, half turned to JD.

Shepard had considered that team. It would've been useful to have at least two Alliance personnel with her at the very least. "Yes, Chief."

"I'll de-armor then." A compromise.

Shepard pursed her lips with a nod. "Fair enough." Mai had hoped that Shepard would've left, but she still stood there, glancing at Tali go through her training.

"How do you think she's doing, Chief Gul?" Shepard posed.

If nothing else, Tali had been interesting to observe for Mai. There was certainly tenacity in her drive, the rocky start giving way to the pure need, the want, to know what to do when the shots starting flying and the bombs started dropping. "Yet to be seen, ma'am."

Her formality threw Shepard off, truthfully, but it was odd. Normally people had put up the front of professionalism, knowing who she was, intimidated by her, but with Mai it felt different. "You settling in okay?"

Mai drew her eyes behind her visor to the floor. The past few days had been a thoughtful routine for her, reading Extranet articles with JD down in the bay, almost shoulder to shoulder. She had never read so much in her life before those last few weeks, and the eye strain had been wearing on even her.

"I have no issues to speak of ma'am." Or issues she would speak of.

Shepard grit her teeth. She really was giving her nothing to work with. "Well, if you have any concerns or would like to requisition anything special, feel free to ask me. I take care of my people, Chief Gul."

Usually her superiors in the UNSC knew better than to wrong her, so this new perspective: of having to approach a CO with grievances, it was new to Mai. The one grievance she did have, it sounded insane to tell anyone: I don't want you to find out more about me.

"I know you do ma'am." Was that a question? It sounded like one to Shepard as she looked up and down her armor again. The paint was new, but the dents and cuts beneath? Testament to battles past.

"Hm. Let me know if Wrex gives you any problems, but, if nothing else, I should go."

She knew how Mai fought, she knew that Wrex wanted to know, but if they did fight, she would reprimand them both. Yet… She understood why he did. It was in her blood as an N7: the very nature of her being that rank meaning that she knew, more than anyone, to fight is to prove themselves. She wanted to prove herself to Mai, for some inexplicable reason. Out of the thrill of a challenge, maybe, but there was something more. Maybe Mai needed to be beaten? Maybe her quiet and withdrawn regard was her attempt at being better than the rest of the crew.

Shepard took in a breath as she bowed out, feeling the fire in her palms. She didn't like the fact she was a biotic, somewhat. The implant in her head was to control it, if anything, not to use it. As a rifleman she wanted to trust only herself and her rifle, not the space magic it seemed to her when she first manifested the usage of eezo as a child. She didn't want to be any different, to have an inherent advantage, over her men; as a child she didn't want to be a freak among her friends even. That stayed true today, but in her older age she recognized no harm could've come from at least exploring the possibilities as she had recently. She didn't want to rely on them.

If she herself were to fight Mai, maybe, she admitted, her abilities could've been the only thing that might've helped her.

She hadn't brushed her teeth in several days, but she remembered the Asari trick, feeling the odd, but pleasant feeling of the plaque on her teeth get rubbed away from a flick of her finger as she waited for the elevator.

When she announced the arrival to Therum had been within the next day, she did it, at least, with a clean breath.

* * *

Only a portion of the Normandy field team would be deployed to Therum, the rest would be utilized however, as was why she had ordered a mass gear up. By the time she had appeared in the bay already geared up, the rest of her people had been ready and waiting. Just as she ordered, the men and women of the field team had been rallied when mission time came.

"Commander on deck!"

A prim fit of Marines, two Naval SOF, and the special guests. They all appeared to her in the middle of the bay, geared up themselves.

"Commander," It was Joker over comms. "we are ten mikes out from Therum. Local weather disturbances over Dr. T'Soni's will make it a bit inadvisable for us to hot drop."

Shepard thumbed her comm piece. "Copy all Joker, put us close as you can, we'll take the Mako in."

"Aye ma'am."

As she approached, she eye'd her own weapon locker. Sniper rifle and a pistol would do her good today. If this was just a pick up on T'Soni then she figured nothing else was needed, still, she needed to be brief with the briefing.

"We green, Marines?"

"Always." Kaiden had answered for most of Hitman, the rest ra'ing.

"Good. Okay. While we're out here with the Normandy, the Admiralty and officers of the flag have seen it fit to ask us to do some errands. Some involve some probable shooty bits, the other intel work. I'll be taking a team down on Therum to secure Dr. T'Soni, the rest of you will fall underneath Lieutenant Alenko and clear out the sector. Can I get an affirmative?"

"Affirmative, commander." They all had repeated back to her. An easy day today, for sure.

"Seeing as we're out here, and because I am a Spectre, well, get used to it. My inbox is filling up every time I look at it, and, well, you try saying no to the Admirals."

"We can do that for you ma'am." Bannon had more than snidely cried out, the rest of Hitman giving her a laugh in agreement. Ashley had fit in comfortably with Hitman, giving her elbow to Bannon's side, which she took well enough. They were Marines, in every sense of the word, and as was Ashley. The remaining Marines of the Normandy hadn't been field team, but rather security on the ship, and they had been shrunk back against the personalities that filled out the Raiders of the Normandy.

"Maybe, maybe not." Shepard had given her a stern smirk in return. "Anyway, Garrus, Wrex, Tali, and the Chiefs. You're with me today." Tali had been anticipating this as she stood by Garrus, she nodding once to herself. She was more than ready, kitted out rather well on top of her suit. "Lieutenant Alenko, you and XO Pressly have the con."

Shepard didn't need to regard the Chiefs at that moment, they very well and away prepared. It was odd that Durante carried a pack at all on his armor, but he did, and it had been a hint to his training as well as he had waited for the Mako to open up its rear. They knew the drill, apparently.

Kaiden had taken the rest of the Marines back to the lockers and away deployment orders from him. He had a list of planets to hit, and it wouldn't take him more than a few hours to dart around and resolve any issues or assignments as forwarded to the Normandy. Many of them had been no less benign than a downed receiver relay or missing gear, but there had been some hinted at some sort of hostile element.

They could handle it, Shepard imagined.

What that left had been the guests. She pointed at the three of them, finger signaling them over to the back of the Mako. Wrex had been the first to arrive up, his shotgun already brandished. "How often you work in a team, Wrex?"

The Krogan had shrugged, nose up at the ceiling and the IFV he had wondered if it could fit both him and Gul. "I'm tough, but not stupid, Shepard. Remember, I did come to you, after all."

If Gul and Wrex had been monsters of size, Tali had been the exact opposite. The team had outfitted her well enough, a battle belt outfitted with weapon holsters on her waist as a bandolier was over her shoulders with a satchel of her own tools. She looked ready. "Why might I ask am I coming, Shepard?"

Shepard had waited for Garrus to walk up, his own rifle ready. "It's a simple pick up. Easy. Get us in the groove. I can trust my Marines to know how I work, but with you all? Well, I just want to get one drop under your belts. I know you're all perfectly capable, but hey, can't hurt."

"And I suppose bringing along other non-humans to meet an Asari whose mother is currently helping the galaxy's most wanted fugitive isn't a tactical decision?" Garrus had a hint of snark in his words.

"Hmph. Didn't think of it like that." Shepard had only threw her hands up, one of them going to the back of the Mako, omni-tool opening it up. "Ladies first." She meant them.

With nothing more than a huff, the three of them had gone into the back of the Mako, a day out with Shepard now in their future. Chief Gul and Chief Durante awaited for them to pile in.

"We good, Chiefs?" Gul said nothing, only giving a short nod as she ducked in, it was Durante that she stopped as he did the same and followed. He tilted his head at her, face hidden behind helmet, wondering why she had stopped him, halfway up the loading ramp into the IFV. "Good job on beating my record by the way, Chief Durante."

His head recoiled upward, surprised Shepard had known. "Forgive me, If I wasn't allowed to-"

Shepard's smile had been one of her best weapons, reaching out and only shaking the man's shoulder armor once. "You must've had good reason. Don't worry about it Chief."

Shepard was many things to many people. Gifted soldier, trusted diplomat, posterchild for the N-Program and the Alliance Marine. Still, of those things she exhibited in her confident stride, one thing she realized, as did all those present in the Mako, was that she was not a good driver.

Of anything.

"Does anyone else know how to drive a Mako…?" For as much as Mai had been a master of vehicle handling in the UNSC, both physically and piloting or driving, she didn't want to bet it here, on a world inundated with magma. Shepard had grated her teeth. "Uh, okay guess I'm up."

The erraticness of the Normandy going through atmosphere had been noted as the hatches of the Mako sealed up, Shepard assuming command upfront in the driver's seat. "Chief Durante. Get up here and get on the gun."

Learn as he went, that's how he'd always worked. From knowing the particular recoil patterns of a Battle Rifle to how to gauge new COs, he had his ways to work around problems. Getting to know how to work the gun of a Mako would be one of them.

He clambered up in the IFV, reminding him no less of a Pelican, the holographic viewports that acted as windows greeting him as he got up front. The gunner's seat was appropriately shotgun, and the joystick presented to that seat had made the gunnery view in front of him rather self-explanatory. As an ODST, vehicular warfare hadn't been his specialty. He'd ridden in Hawks and Warthogs, of course, hitched rides on Scorpions and gotten on the gun of a Gungoose during the more eccentric raiding missions on desert planets, but past that? The 155mm gun of the Mako would be the biggest gun he had ever handled.

"We do our homework on Therum?" Shepard had flipped the switches in the cockpit, the rumble of the Mako's engines turning on.

Garrus had answered. "Human industrial world. Sparsely populated by miners, otherwise untouched. It's an off season right now so I don't think any miners are here at all… I know Turian industrial worlds are the same."

"There's an apparent Prothean presence. As is why the Asari is here." Wrex had grunted out, shotgun between his legs, his armor barely fitting into a seat. "You know, I never did care much for them."

"Do tell, Wrex?" Shepard had been more than willing to listen to a Krogan who had lived long before her, and, chances were, more than likely to outlive her.

"They're dead for a reason, and only the strong can survive in this galaxy." He glanced at Mai during that. She was a war bundled up in the shape of a man, and Wrex had seen nothing more enticing than to fight. As long as that hadn't been satiated, she would be tested in other ways. Even now, being with a team, it was trying for her.

"Joker," Shepard called in. "Run by comms with the settlements one last time. If we're going in blind, least we could say is we tried."

"Aye ma'am. One moment."

The Alliance needed planets like this to fuel and to build itself: Therum, an eyesore by any other name, was a welcome candidate to be sucked dry. Mai knew the type of planets. Even the Insurrection had its fair amount of industrial power to sustain a two-front war: between the UNSC and the Covenant. Not enough to make a difference, but enough to make a dent. As was why she was tasked at all.

"No dice Commander. This side of the planet is pretty deserted."

JD's leg had been shaking, bouncing up and down from the pads of his feet up front. He was anxious. "Human." The low drawl of Wrex had him tip his head back. "What's your deal?"

JD had paused before answering, but there was nothing to hide here. "The in-between gets me." He was fine with being in a ship, fine with being on the battlefield. It was the drop in the middle that had him worry the most. "I'm fine."

"Don't look it." Wrex gruffed, shuffling his shotgun over to his hip. He had been definitely alien to the two SOF, but, yet, his personality was distinctly human. The gruffness, that confidence that could be easily mistaken for arrogance. The scar that ran across his face was but only one, and not even the deepest in his life. Rare, was it when Mai had found someone who had done more fighting than her.

Garrus had been glancing around the IFV, intrigued, his mandibles twitching, a tell-tale signature of a Turian in thought. "Humans have such an odd way with military machining. First your spaceborne fighters, now this… It's odd."

"How, so Garrus?" Tali had also been looking on the insides. The Migrant Fleet barely sustained a ground force, let alone an armored corp.

"Not enough armor to be a tank, and not enough armament to really do anything."

"Jack of all trades, master of none." Shepard had recounted her training with the Mako. "Handy for a ship like the Normandy. If we had an actual tank it means we're being tasked for the wrong mission."

Tali wanted to make a comment on the fact Mai was being brought along, and she herself was built like one, but didn't. Not when said woman was sitting right across from her.

"Approaching drop point one in thirty seconds." Joker had communicated, Mai feeling in her bones the Normandy breaking atmosphere.

They had no external view in the troop compartment, only the rumble of its engines giving them any sensory to the outside world.

"We're rolling out of the Normandy, so we'll be in freefall for a few moments. Brace yourselves." JD knew the procedure, remembering the first time he had ever dropped as an ODST. The viewport forward saw the Normandy's bay open, the red sky of a magma planet seen. "With Chief Gul in the back, who knows how hard we'll hit earth."

Whatever it had been, JD knew within himself what it felt like to hit the ground hard.

He found handhold at the corners of his seat.

"Start rolling Commander, I'll fling ya."

"Aye, see you in a bit Joker." Shepard held the control stick of the Mako and pushed it forward, the wheels of it lurching forward. Distinctly the takeup reminded Mai and JD of Warthogs. Everything about Shepard was doing felt wrong to them however as they felt the surface beneath them disappear and the Mako start dropping.

JD felt those familiar urges kick in. The want for him to take in breath through his nose felt as he felt gravity in his bones and balls.

Wrex had probably felt this before, he taking the event with as much casualness as a man over a millennium old could've had. Garrus and Tali however, they were shocked momentarily, a yelp coming from Tali as the two of them felt for handholds within the cabin.

The landing zone below had been shown to Shepard on the dash as she settled into the fall, feeling for the secondary pedal that was the only thing that stood between them and being preemptively buried six feet under and then some. She jammed her foot onto that pedal, the jets of the Mako kicking as the entire span of the drop took no more than ten seconds, the impact of wheels hitting ground causing the vehicle to bounce before Shepard locked the wheels in place.

Only then did she starkly remember her helmet hadn't been on. That risk of concussion kept her full aware as the Mako stopped shaking, off to the corner of her eye she spotting the Normandy jetting off.

"Hitman 1-Actual has touched ground." She reported scanning her surroundings. They landed surrounded by red and grey magma rock quarries, the deactivated and unused machines and tunnels that led into mines surrounding them in a corridor that led to their destination as they understood it: The only Prothean dig-site reported in the area.

Council intel had forwarded them some information from Thessia: Liara T'Soni had remained out on Therum for a good part of the year, funded by a fellowship out of Thessia. Apparently Therum had been the only planet they were willing to fund, Dr. T'Soni's theories on the Protheans not mainstream enough for them to get behind.

As was the life of Academia, Shepard figured.

"Copy all." Joker responded back. "Be aware we're picking some pretty gnarly readings at the dig site. It's nothing I've seen before, so heads up. Normandy out."

She looked back into the troop compartment. "We all good?"

Mai had hardly moved at all. She was used to this type of insertion. She'd dropped in an ODST a handful of times and, at worst, she had ridden down a Sabre prototype that was on fire and lost control. She survived that, she could survive this obviously standard insertion procedure. She looked around the cabin, reporting for them. "We're condition green, ma'am."

"_Might not be after riding with me for a bit." _Shepard had said under her breath fast, looking at the road forward. Not quiet enough as she saw JD give her that look of a confused puppy with his helmet. "Look, I spent all my time walking as a kid, I've never driven a car, sky or land-based, and I usually don't operate these things."

Before JD could respond he again was reaching for a grip as his ass went back into the seat, the Mako lurching forward.

* * *

The passengers chalked it up to, mostly, the terrain of Therum as opposed to Shepard's skill as a driver. JD knew better upfront, but he neglected to make any hint otherwise.

As long as they hadn't driven into the literal lakes of fire, they were fine for now as he eased off his own controls, no apparent need for the Mako's gun as they started the long drive.

"So, uh, any of us dabble in academics? Could help us understand Dr. T'Soni." Garrus had been more than willing to fill in the silence between them otherwise in the cabin. "I personally wasn't smart enough, so I've got no idea about how research expeditions work."

"Makes sense." Wrex commented, laying his head back as if settling in for a nap. "You Turians aren't known for your smarts."

"No need to be nasty." Garrus grit through his teeth.

"Oh, don't mind me. It's no truer than how I'm known for my good looks."

Ignoring the obvious vibes in the back, JD had instead peered through his viewfinder with the Mako's cannon. It wasn't a planet he had known back in his universe, but it would've fallen into the outer colonies if this was back in his galaxy. This type of planet, adorned with a rich mineral base, these types were coveted by the UNSC in the waning days of the war as more and more planets fell. Of the planets Mai had gave them, some had been valuable resource planets. Perhaps Therum had been one of them.

This wasn't by any means a concentrated mining effort on Therum they all noticed as they drove by. It felt like the ramshackle efforts of the old American Gold Rush, machinery and implements all worn down and haphazardly set to grab rocks from the hearth of the planet.

The Protheans were here for probably the same reason, all those millennia ago. The idea of Protheans, of a race of precursors whose decisions defined the galaxy even now, to JD, it had let him understand something that the Covenant had acted on: Gods. He understood now what Gods were if the gods of the Covenant were like the Prothean.

Of course, he wouldn't have had any knowledge of the Forerunners, unlike Mai.

Seen out of the corner of her eyes, her handlers sometimes told her to not outright look as she stumbled upon, behind Covenant lines, ruins or machines that went beyond her own understanding. The silver metal sheen and the orange glows of the left behinds of a race that came before. What had happened to them was perhaps a question she was not worthy to know. Maybe, just maybe, the Forerunners had their own Reapers which Shepard alluded to.

Half an hour passed as they continued down the path of mining stations and camps, all empty, not a soul present as the unkind driving on Shepard's part kept every moment of it a ride.

"Shouldn't have worn this armor." Garrus grumbled aloud, rubbing his backside. Tali had gone quiet, in her own thoughts. She thought their first drop was going to be more involved, and just as JD jittered his leg, so did she eventually.

Unlike JD, she stopped when someone noticed.

It was only right that someone who had worn a helmet for more or less her entire life was able to pick up the subtleties of even Mai. Under her gaze, quiet, and almost unknowable, Tali froze. This woman, she hadn't even seen her skin. She was no more, no less unknowable than the Geth it felt like, and that was the danger Tali felt as they locked eyes behind visors.

As a Quarian, she knew more than anyone the armor they wore protected more than just the body. Underneath that monster of an armor, what had Chief Gul, as she had known her, was protecting?

"Contact, IFF unknown, coming high to our six." JD's voice had rang out as he saw the radar attached to the gun's view finder. Shepard had immediately banged the Mako left into the side of a hill for any sort of cover besides a magma lake, the rumbling vibrating them all now as JD grabbed the control stick.

Mai and JD knew the feeling well: the familiar hum of a transport craft above them switching them into combat mode.

The shadow that enveloped them had been just short of the size of the Normandy, the curve, the purple grey aesthetics had almost tricked JD into thinking _they _had been back, tracking them.

Tali leaned to get a look out of the driver's view ports, and what she saw, she knew. "Geth!" She almost wanted to jump out of her seat. "Sit still! Their ships don't have windows so they probably won't spot us! Too much geothermal activity here."

Everyone had a gun unhooked and ready, Mai being just short of barging out alone, however Shepard had taken Tali's advice, cutting the engine as she observed the troop transport, shaped almost like a maggot, sweep forward of their path forward, pausing only momentarily to drop-

"Armatures." Tali had basically been upfront now, peering her head forward into JD's space, the man eventually just offering her the viewfinder. "Geth anti-tank and anti-infantry units. What's this gun rated for?"

Shepard remembered blowing open a house on her firing command on Torfan. "I'm guessing good enough… Shit, seems like we made the call, coming here first."

Wrex had thumbed grenades into his shotgun. "Shame I wasn't alive for the first Geth Uprising. The Krogan might've saved the galaxy twice."

"Anything I should know?" Garrus and Wrex hadn't fought the Geth before. Wrex exuded his usual confidence, however Garrus, he knew better, activating his rifle.

"Typical." The words from Mai had shocked Garrus. Every word out of her was a surprise. "You can take it."

Shepard glanced down at her omni at a map, peering at those armatures in the distance: four legged walkers with the head of a Geth unit on top of them. The transport ship had disappeared off into the distance, but only before dropping vague shapes beyond a hill. "There's a security checkpoint at the other side of this lake… Didn't know the Geth were smart enough to come track down Dr. T'Soni as well."

"They're a hivemind, Commander. On their own, their no smarter than a child. Perhaps Saren told them she was here." JD glanced down as Tali leaned over him. She had taken one of his SMGs for this deployment, and, he had only hoped that he and Hitman had given her enough of a crash course for her to be good.

"Chief Durante, on the gun. We're weapons hot people. If I tell you to disembark we're popping out and hot. We all good on that?"

"Use the Mako as cover?"

Shepard tapped the ceiling of the cab once. "It's what my tax dollars pay for."

JD had gotten back on the gun, tapping Tali's shoulder and sending her back as Shepard gunned the engine forward. He thanked his stars that the gun was stabilized as Shepard put on her impression of a German tank commander during the Blitz. As the yards closed in, there was only one thing JD could do but depress the trigger.

* * *

Any discerning Geth might've been otherwise concerned when the erected defenses of their captured security checkpoint opened fire. Being AI as they were, they didn't feel fear, not even as the rumble of explosions taking out those turrets silenced them, only to be followed by something rather illogical:

A flying tank.

JD had drops harder than this as the Mako with its jump jets had jumped over an erected security wall.

Moments earlier, Wrex had made some analogy, it being less than ideal to punch a monster directly in its mouth. The head tended to be the best target however as Shepard gunned the jets as hard as she could as they touched the ground, everyone bouncing up at least a little before Shepard had flung herself back into the troop compartment clawing to the hatch. "JD on the gun!"

He kept silent as the roar of the gun answered for him. The sound of gunshots impacting the side of the Mako dwarfed by a cannon going off.

Mai had been ready to go, barely having moved in the impact as Tali was still shaken. Of all things, it was advisable that she be on her feet first instead of Shepard.

"Ma'am." She said once as Shepard popped the exit hatch. It wasn't a question as much as it was a decision, Mai forcing herself forward and up before Shepard could protest. If she did however, it would've been vain. Who else but Mai to be on point?

She had just short of vaulted up out of the Mako, the Geth unloading into it as its kinetic barriers flared underneath the burden. It was that shield that Mai was protected by, but one she didn't need as she slid off the back and shouldered her rifle. Her motion sensor still hadn't been properly calibrated to hostiles in her new reality, but it told enough, everyone but JD highlighted yellow.

A dozen or so contacts surrounding her, all Geth, all troop strength judging on the volume of fire. Those Geth a few meters away hiding behind crates and boxes in the middle of that checkpoint only now focusing their oculi on her. Raising her rifle she had no hesitation about her position.

Four pulls of the trigger, typically. That's what she noticed on Eden Prime as the metallic flash of her gun went off, working her way left to right as the Geth she was shooting at focused less on the Mako and more on her. The Mako's gun continued to fire, dealing with the front sector.

The way a Geth died, Mai had to memorize it: the way white blood flew from its body from the killing shot as its ocular light flashed and went out, its body going to the floor, exploding, and then, seemingly, melting. How Tali had been able to secure one she didn't know, but props to her as she gunned down the offending Geth on that volcanic ground. Shepard had finally come out in the few seconds Mai had gotten her head start, then Wrex, then Garrus, and then finally Tali.

They all had their own shields, the accuracy of the Geth nothing Mai hadn't seen before from trained militiamen, so that immediate burst up and out had definitely, if the Geth had a function for this, surprised them.

Shields had taken away some level of urgency for humanity. Mai had been trained otherwise, but had come into her own given her privilege. JD couldn't be as quite convinced, secretly happy he was on the gun and making scrap of the Geth.

Garrus and Wrex, they had take a knee covering one sector almost immediately, but Tali, Shepard looked back to check, had stumbled, shadowing the two before realizing what they were doing, finding her own sector forward as Shepard passed behind Mai to check the other side of the Mako.

She had, in the rush of combat, knocked her first against Mai's shoulder, signaling that she had been crossing. The Spartan only upped her fire.

The eternal hunch Shepard had in her back in combat had been out of experience, trying to minimize her form as she brought her own rifle up to bear at more Geth, left without cover from their ill-advised entry method. The quality of quantity defined Shepard as she opened up with her rifle, transitioning to her stomach in prone as white fluid flew from targets hit.

Mai hadn't been used to operating with a team, lesser still she hadn't been used to operating to those not on her level, so she snapped her head right at the guests. Wrex had been remarkably well disciplined. He had stayed put and held his sector along with Garrus, and Tali, copying them, had done so as well, her shoulder seemingly locked to the stock of her SMG.

Another shot rang out from the Mako, perhaps closer than warranted, the shot landing and sending dust up, only for it to rain back down in the pitter patter of rocks.

With Mai having gone first, it gave Shepard ample time to put back on her helmet, and she was thankful for that as she felt the rapid pebbles bounce off her brain bucket.

She circled back around to the front of the Mako as JD swung the turret in a three sixty degree sweep. "Clear?!" He yelled out over comms.

Mai looked at her motion tracker, wondering if she or JD had mentioned that she possessed them at all. Around her: nothing. "Clear."

The checkpoint had been set up by whatever mining company took reigns here for various safety reasons, either bordering on miner uprisings or stolen equipment, and that had meant gates in the enclosure, leading to where they needed to go, all of them shut.

Two buildings had been on either side of the Gate that the Mako needed to go through.

Shepard had sucked in one breath before turning on comms. "JD, try for the Normandy, notify them that we're engaged."

"Aye ma'am."

"Chief Gul, hit the building on the right, we'll take left. Find the mechanisms to get that gate open and we'll move up and out."

As far as general MFDs and omni-tool interfaces went, operating comms on the Mako had been something JD figured out painlessly enough, holding his transmission and sending it. "Hitman to Normandy. Reporting engagement with Geth forces. Out."

Mai had already, in her stride, approached the building attached to the gate, the walls of the checkpoint reminding her of the security stations on human colonies. Even with her size she had outpaced the other group to the building.

"Wrex on point, Tali you're on our tail."

Tail, on point, sector, cascading, terms which Tali was not familiar with, but glad that the Marines had told her the language, she moving off of the lines as they stacked on the wall next to the open doorway, peering out and behind them. It was with that the Quarian was gifted the view of Mai performing the same breach and clear, albeit on her own.

Mai's motion sensor tracked three targets, she going for her belt for one of the saucer like grenades issued.

In her mind, at that moment, she remembered skipping rocks with JD back on Earth. She had been throwing grenades all her life, but the new shape of the standard in that galaxy, his advice came through: _"Like a frisbee."_

She didn't, but she was reminded, taking it into her right hand as she stepped off the wall and aimed at the door from an angle, the insides plain, sporting to her vision only a few chairs and tables for security staff. Like an underhanded push the grenade went flying in with a flick of her wrist, bouncing off the left wall and then out into the portion of the building she couldn't see.

It had been a flash grenade, testing whether or not visual stimuli could overload the Geth.

The metal bounce was only followed by the pop of the grenade, she sending herself forward, slicing the pie with her sights as she found three Geth units with guns up at the door, but paused.

The Geth were, amazingly, standardized at her height, but it was a step down from Elites she noticed, her rifle aiming at their eyes as they finally responded.

She felt herself wince by pure stimulus as one shot did hit her kinetic barrier, but the sound of three bodies hitting the floor had otherwise detracted from that one shot.

One shot was usually all it took for some people, but she had been too expensive for that to happen to her as she approached their bodies, their self-destruct contingencies activating.

On the other side of the gate she heard the gunfire of the other team.

"Clear." She heard from them first, from Garrus.

"Clear." Mai reported, glancing around the room.

_"I can't go where you go Mai, do what you do. Not for the reasons you do."_

It was her first moment of solitude for a while, in the middle of that room as the Geth dissolved and sparked away at her feet. Loneliness used to be her normal, and now, this was an exception to her new life. She didn't quite remember what her true idle thoughts were in her lonely moments, stalking Covenant or Insurgents on planets where she had been the only human alive. Everything, everything, had been about the mission, the way forward to her objectives. She didn't think too often of her wants or needs, of the next time she was going to shower, to sleep, or to eat good food. Those thoughts didn't matter to her, irrelevant to the mission. Her mind, simply, did not work that way then.

She was forced to look inward however. JD had done that to her.

He could do what she did, on a measure that she thought was more than tolerable. For him to be support, it would've been tolerable to her. He could clear rooms, kill Covenant, act in the context cases she was used to… and yet.

It took hours after he said that to her, she repeating the words in her heads when it was quiet of her thoughts, to know what he meant.

He didn't want to wage war for the rest of his life, not because he couldn't, but because he didn't want to.

He spoke not from an aspect of his capabilities and training, but rather from someplace else. Mai had thought for far too long, embarrassingly so, on where. When she figured, it was because she didn't understand herself.

He was only human.

"I'm pulling up now." His voice brought her out of her temporary reverie, Shepard had found the switch for the gate.

She glanced at her rifle. Prototype as it was it had some trouble venting heat, but she had flared its core with one button, letting it steam out as she exfiltrated.

"You really don't hesitate on killing Geth, do ya?" Shepard had asked of Tali as the other group mounted back onto the Mako and the security gate cleared open.

"Why should I?" Tali pressed her gun back onto her holster near her shoulder.

Shepard had clambered on top of the Mako, offering Mai a hand up, but she not taking it, climbing up herself. She paused a moment as she got on, Shepard reeling her hand back.

"I'm too heavy."

"Ah."

With that understanding they both went back in, JD transitioning back over to the gunner's seat.

Five minutes. That's all that took.

Wrex had settled back into his seat, satisfied at the moment. "You sure you don't got quads, Shepard?" He referred to flying into a Geth held base like they just did.

Shepard had shrugged as she passed him, back up front. "Violence of action, Wrex. I'll make the Geth understand that." Back in the driver's seat she had deactivated her gun again, mounting it in a slot in the cabin. "Nice shooting, Chief Durante."

Behind his helmet he nodded as he double checked the cooling on the cannon. Nothing too bad.

"They're not too different than any other person, eh?'

"You got kills to your name, Turian?" Wrex's value of a person seemed to be based on that: how much hurt, how much fight they could deal.

"Pirates. Mostly." Garrus answered promptly, almost ashamed. "I did my time in the Navy."

Wrex might've wanted to make a comment, a boast, but he was more insightful then that, even as that urge came over him. "It's odd. For machines, I expected more."

Tali had taken trail position during the breach, she snapping onto the side of the wall as they moved in and, promptly, dealt with a Geth that had popped out of its concealment. She was snappy on the draw, on the trigger pull, and more than judicious with the application of gunfire.

It felt good, pumping rounds into an enemy that had been so ingrained into their people's suffering.

Her leg stopped shaking.

"Yep." Wrex agreed to himself, glancing over at Mai, seeing her grey armor now with hints of red dust on it. "I expected more."

* * *

He should've been a Scorpion operator, with how his day was going. Admittedly gunning down Geth with a cannon had been less morbid than doing the same with even a Warthog's chaingun to a Grunt. Flesh versus metal, and he preferred seeing metal torn apart. Seeing the insides of his enemies, although useful a thought in his aggression, was by far harmful out of combat.

The Geth obviously hadn't anticipated Shepard as she continued onward with the Mako. The lone transport ship that had been bouncing between hiding and dropping support in front of them not armed itself, and what it could fight back with promptly stepped out by either cannonfire or, in this case-

Garrus looked at the floor, really looking past it and imagining what a Mako's suspension was like when pieces of Geth had been in it. "Someone's gotta take a look at that later."

Shepard had been giggling, almost, as she ran over several Geth units. "Hah, shit. You offering Garrus?"

He had nothing else to do. "Maybe."

It was all in good jest however, not like the Mako could go anywhere given the terrain forward. The Geth were defending the final pathway up to a set up dig site, once mining, now scientific.

"She had support staff, setting up, but after that? I think she ran it alone." Shepard pointed at the hints of machinery up past the hill, past rock outcropings she could jet over. "Alright, everyone disembark, we're rucking it."

Garrus was about ready to throw up, given her driving and then the added battle maneuvers, so he was glad to at least get what constituted as fresh air after the further half-hour of driving toward the dig site. He didn't mind taking point up and out of the hatch, seeing the bits and pieces of Geth that had gotten in their way. If he wanted to join Shepard to get results, here it was.

The size of the pathway forward, leading up to the digsite had been just big enough for people, and even then he doubted, looking at it, that Wrex might've gotten through. He had enough trouble getting through the Mako's hatch as Garrus offered a hand to him. He pushed it away however groaning up and out. "Save it, Turian."

Garrus held his word as the two slid off, the rest following, Shepard more or less locking the car behind them.

She wanted to make comment on how, after that one day, the Mako deserved a name and maybe some art for its service. She knew better as she heard the clicking of Geth communication further ahead.

"Cover, cover, cover." She chopped her hand in mid-air, talking to the squad, but more talking to Tali. "I didn't mean to throw you into the shit like this so soon, but here we are. Don't get killed for my sake."

"I can handle myself Shepard." Tali knew everyone had doubts about her, the aggravation in her voiced only now, cradling her gun.

"I know you can. But I've been doing this longer than-" Shepard glanced at Wrex. "Most of us."

"All it takes is one hit, Quarian." The Krogan grumbled, moving forward himself.

"Five meter spread if we can. We push up and up till we get to the dig site." Shepard ordered, the Normandy having yet to respond to comms.

The slowness of their walk up the path, guns at the ready, had been detestable to Mai. It was all done, surely, in the name of proper tactical procedure and readiness in the face of an active enemy, but safety was hardly something Mai abided by as she, left most on the wing climbing up that rocky path, pressed forward.

It was as much of a place to have a firefight as any as, from over the crest of the path, a squad of Geth pressed down. "Contact!"

Rocks big enough to hide people taking cover behind them had blessed both sides. Mai didn't remember seeing the Geth take cover at Eden Prime, but they had been doing so now as they contorted their bodies to take firing positions.

The nuances of Shepard's command to the average Alliance Marine was fully understandable, given human understanding. With others however, it made Shepard vocal, handsy, as she did what she was born to do apparently.

"Spread! Mai, JD! Left flank go! Rest of you find and angle and keep it!"

Tali cut a thin figure, she easily able to find a rock that hid her as she hunkered, the Geth, given the fact they saw a Quarian, opening up on her as Wrex and Garrus spread down from her, drawing their fire.

Eight-foot mobiles. Mai had counted as she vibrated her entire form, just on the need to do something more than just stand there. The Geth chipped away at Tali's cover, even she recognizing she needed to move as she sprang toward Garrus's rocky cover, however when she started, she stumbled, her shields flaring up as Garrus and Shepard saw, immediately exposing themselves for her sake as they opened fire back.

Tali had been panting as she found Garrus's back, dragging him into cover with her as she regained her composure, Shepard feeling her shield's break and cursing as her rifle ran hot.

"Commander!" JD had ground out, still holding his aim downrange as Geth tried to move, only for him and Mai to dissuade them.

"Stay put!" She looked over left at them and yelled, snapping back to Tali. "You alright?!"

"I'm good! I'm good!" She didn't sound like it, but Shepard didn't see her injured as she stood back up as held her SMG tight.

A concussive blast erupted from Wrex, his shotgun shooting a grenade, only to blow apart some cover as the Geth pulled back from it.

A few shots broke their shields, breaking into the synthetic skin, but none had fallen.

Hell with it, Mai thought, stepping out of her cover before Shepard could notice. JD could only follow her.

The Geth snapped their attention from the center, that much Shepard noticed as she popped out, but didn't see Geth. She twisted her head left and saw Mai's normal instead.

She ran sprinted left of her cover, flanking, a grenade in her left hand as she felt the impacts of fire on her shields, but she tanked it, ducking back behind cover as she let the grenade go behind the Geth's cover. The punt of an explosion made her run again, right into them, rifle firing all the way as another grenade was primed. A chest high rock had been barricaded between them and her, however it was no matter, not as she cocked her legs and, in a feat beyond anyone there, she jumped over it, shooting in mid-air all the while as she dropped the cooked grenade away from her. She landed on the ground right next to a Geth, but her right arm, still holding her rifle, brought her elbow up in a swipe, only to then bring the stock of the gun down on the Geth as her kinetic shields broke by being so close to the grenades.

What remained had only been her underused energy shields.

The Geth had either been outright destroyed or shattered, she making quick work of the rest as she rose her gun again and put them down.

JD puffed a breath of nose out of his mouth as he first of the group pressed forward to support Mai. He knew what this dance was, how Spartans really fought. The rest were left at awe of a woman who moved so fast, yet so powerfully, it kept them in stutters moving up behind her as more Geth came over the ridge.

Another grenade was in her hand as she tossed it at the clumped group, her rifle feeling warm even through her suit's gloves.

"Mai!" JD. His SMG had been in her hands as he passed in front of her into cover, exchanging out. Spartans had been known, when working with Marines, to simply trade weapons out of convenience. He traded his on his own presumption, and she had no complaints as she pressed forward without him.

Spartan Time kicked in for her as she ran at another group of Geth, trigger held down. This was her normal, her familiar zone as she ran directly into a Geth with her shoulder, laying on it as it was crushed and aiming the SMG to the rest as they tried to account for such a move. They all had fallen onto the ground with her as she finally arrived at the top of the hill, only, upon knowing what was there, slid herself down to JD, taking her gun back and he his.

Shepard had been quick behind them. "What the fuc-"

"Armature." Mai reported before Shepard could respond to her fighting. "25 meters that way. Support infantry."

She peeked over again before, like a dream, blue return fire in bolts came at them, reminding her too much of another war.

Shepard shook her priorities straight as they all rushed up to the crest of the hill and laid on their stomachs.

"Garrus, Wrex, covering fire when you peek above this! Mai, JD, push out on their go! Tali on my ass!" She yelled her orders and every one of them affirmed as JD psyched himself, drawing in breaths as he moved left of Mai in a roll, coming over her legs as he crawled up only to tap her shoulder. He was with her.

Garrus had laid some of his grenades from his belt in front of him, Wrex realizing what he was doing as he did the same with his own assortment, the Krogan motioning to Garrus with three fingers up, then two, then one, then none at all.

Half a dozen grenades came over the crest of the hill from them, popping off as Shepard got off her stomach and took a knee, Garrus and Wrex craning their guns over as they pulled their triggers with intent to suppress.

Mai had one fist on the ground as she threw herself over, JD behind her as they latched onto a pair of Geth who were trying to approach the hill's crest, only to be gunned down by the two as Mai's barriers again took hits, keeping the two of them safe as they found a walled scaffolding.

They had made it over the crest and had a better view of the field as return fire kept Garrus and Wrex down. "Hop over the hill Shepard, you have cover right in front of you. Steel crates."

Mai had gone to the corner of the wall, only to poke out with her rifle and see the Geth had their aim at them. She snapped back, but not before an unknown had been directly on top of them. JD had pitched it first, snapping up to the scaffolding they took cover behind, seeing a twisted form liable to be seen in nightmares. Geth did not need to abide by conventional biological standards, as was why there had been one, like a spider, bathed in a sickly white staring down at them and, evidently, charging its weapon.

JD snapped his gun up at the new contact, the unit darting away impossibly fast further down, away from their aim. He went to the other side of the wall, in line with the scaffolding as it moved away from them, transitioning his SMG to his left shoulder as another Geth unit had been trying to flank them.

He had been more than diligent to stop that as a storm of rounds punched through its shield then body, collapsing to the floor.

How many Wraiths had she taken out? All with nothing but a grenade and her own two feet in situations like this? Enough that she had considered her options, but not fast enough to account for Shepard. "Mai, hold your angle! That's an order!" There was some fierceness behind that, some anger almost as Mai ground her feet and stepped back from her cover, affording her a wider angle to shoot downrange at Geth behind their own cover.

At each sighting of them she had snapped, keeping them pinned as the remaining four of them crested over and into the crate cover, sliding, stumbling in Tali's case.

"Incoming!" Garrus had seen the bright flash of a rocket launched at them from the Armature, the group ducking down as the rocket knocked right into their cover, the only reason they hadn't gone was due to the fact that rocks and minerals rode in them. The crates shook as Garrus and Wrex pushed along further right behind more cover of either rocks or mining equipment.

"JD, keep pushing left! Draw fire!"

Without a word he had, snapping out of the wall and pushing forward, the covering of the scaffolding hiding him from direct attack from the armature.

The head of that spider-like Geth appeared again, out from on top of the walkways, peering down, it sending a burst of fire JD's way as he dived left unkindly into a ladder, and then behind some steel sheets. The shots had landed at his feet and over his shoulder, and as he crawled into cover he rolled onto his back, aiming up before taking a knee, hearing the spider scamper on the walkways above them.

He opened up into the walkways where the sounds were, using his motion tracker, the Geth unit flinging itself off in a graceful jump. It froze in time however as the blue fire of a biotic caught it. It was Shepard on her own back, still in cover, but able to catch it, reaching out with her hands. Mai aimed up at it, frozen in mid-air, but Shepard's hoarse voice gave her another course of action.

"Mai!" Shepard had yelled out at her, "Catch!"

The spider-like synthetic, frozen in its invisible grasp, was hurled toward Mai, the gun let go of and hanging on her sling as she took the Geth in her arms as if a bride, only to move her hands to a leg and an arm, stringing it out taut, and, as it clicked its synthetic language, brought down on her knee, torn in two as her grey armor was coated.

JD pushed forward continually, stopping each way whenever he had flanked Geth behind cover, only to duck behind his own when the armature saw him. Soon enough he had been panting, focusing on his own breath as he found himself just nigh in line with the armature, the sound of its legs moving like great piledrivers.

"All the way left, by the armature." JD thumbed his comms as he stayed hidden.

The Geth had noticed him, making his move, some of the infantry moving to intercept, but them moving had caused them to be in line of fire of Mai. Even the armature itself. It would've opened up a rocket at JD, had it not been for the mass of fire taken, shot by Shepard as she rested her rifle on the side of the crate and opened up.

"Rest of you keep pushing right and up! Take down that armature!"

Tali had flown from her side almost immediately, outpacing Garrus and Wrex as she found new cover forward, the group pushing the Geth back as the armature turned itself around to deal with Shepard.

Its shields were strong, that much Shepard knew as she distracted it, axillary fire impacting near her as the first few shots made contact with her shields.

Wrex had been pushing up fast and hard, breaking through some machinery just to crush the Geth on the other side, a biotic assisted push making that sound in a loud clash as Garrus and Tali dealt with any standing Geth by him.

JD held his breath. Stupid won fights. If he hadn't any idea what he was doing, neither would the enemy, technically. Behind the armature had been nothing but a flat rocky quarry, already mined out and flat. No cover, but enough room to-

JD pushed and ran out, one hand with his SMG waving it at the armature as it peppered its shields further, the armature, logically, deciding that he had been the easiest to deal with target, gradually turning its back to Wrex.

Shepard saw the opening. So did Wrex as he screamed out a cry, both of war and of triumph, running straight at the turned armature and bypassing any other Geth.

"Covering fire for Wrex!" As that was happening Wrex hadn't slowed down, finally making contact like a rugby player from Earth culture, finding one of the Armature's legs and throwing his weight into it, causing the machine to buckle and fall. Its head might've craned enough to use its weapons to attack the Krogan, currently trying to dismember it, but that wasn't to be as its eye was perforated as Wrex, by pure force alone, broke its shields. Perforated by a Creator

Tali had stepped out of cover on her own volition, SMG on fire it seemed as she trained her shots on it, turning it into scrap as its head erupted in sparks and white fluid. Her SMG overheated, only for her to drop it entirely and go for her pistol. How many times had the Marines, just for the sake of it, taught her to draw like that? Enough as Wrex finally tore one of its legs away and drew his shotgun, rapidly pumping fire into the Armature as it finally gave out.

Garrus went wide right, taking on the last of the Geth easily as they were distracted on the armature going down. The loss of an armature seemed to have affected a local combat hivemind.

Tali had thumbed her comms on accidentally during that last move, her panted breathings heard by all as she froze there, in her stance.

JD had pressed forward again as the armature fell, making sure they hadn't missed any, turning back around to Tali and making a slicing motion at her neck. She realized why immediately, cutting her comms. Only after that did JD offer an upward palm. _The hell was that?_

The same could be asked of him he realized.

"Clear." Shepard rang out as she too pressed forward, the word being passed by all. "You okay Tali?"

She looked at the pistol in her hand, holstering it, shaking her head. "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine Commander." Then the breaths of laughter came from her, amused at herself, remembering a story from home. When Shepard cocked her head at her, she could only give it up. "There was a story, a while ago, from one of the first Pilgrimages. A child of a Marine who had survived the Geth War… His gift to the Flotilla was…" She hesitated. Whenever boys had talked of perhaps using his example to complete their Pilgrimages, mothers often slapped them. "Killing as many Geth as he could."

The armature smoked as it broke itself apart like a self-building toy in reverse, horrifying the more anyone looked at it turn into dust. "Did the Flotilla accept him?"

Wrex thought of this dialog fondly. He hadn't been as proud of some other Battlemasters, but there had been one who wore the bones of his enemies. It'd been a while since he'd heard from Drack.

Tali silently nodded her head, looking toward the mine entrances around them.

"Chief Durante?" Shepard had asked, more curiously. "Hell of a move."

"I was covered." He responded simply. He could always rely on his fellow ODSTs, but now, that help manifested in Wrex, the Krogan locking eyes with him and giving a nod, appreciative of the recognition.

"Chief Gul." Shepard had sounded sterner as she addressed Mai, the woman moving up, rifle still at half-ready. "Mind telling me why you broke formation down there?"

Mai's answer was true, quick, snappy. "The Geth were pulling back, injured by the grenade from the Krogan," she hadn't even referred to him by his name, but he didn't mind, it was a treat to finally see her in action. "I saw an opening."

"You could've gotten yourself overwhelmed."

And yet… The rest of the team looked at Mai. Her? Be overwhelmed? The way she fought had not at all been like them and it yielded results. Hadn't she accounted for over half the kills?

"Affirmative, commander." Mai answered simply. No argument. Not here, not now.

Shepard sniffled, taking, finally a good look at her surroundings. Of the mining tunnels around, only one had been opened, and Geth footprints spoke to recent activity. "We should go. On me."

* * *

It reminded Mai of the sewers on some of the more built up Insurrectionist planets. Much of the human colonies throughout the UNSC had been built on the same standard planning and infrastructure support, most, if not all major colonies starting from a Pheonix-class ship. The large, circular piping leading down, down, further into the rock as the heat rose.

Harsh lights lit the way down, further smaller pipes and tubing pumping in "fresh" air to miners, presumably.

"If you want a war story, Shepard," Garrus had recounted as they moved their way down the pipes, JD taking rear section. "When you humans tried for Torfan, the Turian fleets also did their own pirate crushing."

"Yeah?"

"One of my first tours had me fighting in mines against pirates who took base in abandoned installations. Truth be told, this brings back, well… good? Yeah, I guess, good memories."

The heat was rising and their armor systems could only keep them so cool. "This don't feel good at all." Shepard was on point. "Sweating to all hell and back."

"Turians prefer heat. Don't get me started on swimming."

Shepard held out a fist up, the team freezing as she saw an ocular light at the end of the pipe-like tunnel. She dropped her assault rifle as she laid on her belly, going for the sniper rifle on her back. Taking in one breath, she held it as Mai made out what was at the end of the hall: a Geth infantry unit.

Dead by the time she herself raised her rifle, the sound of the shot echoing.

"Move up!" Shepard had holstered her sniper rifle, assault rifle up as the squad moved up front without her. Mai had, in her pace, made it up first, another Geth unit investigating what had happened as it met Mai instead, its body being pumped with lead dead as the exit of the tunnel exited to more walkways amdist a deep cavern. The walkway looped around and came under the exit, a Geth directly below her as Mai hopped the railing, knife out in the same motion, and impaled the Geth through its eye before the rest of the team figured what had happened.

"I swear, I just want to fight her more and more by the moment." It was a compliment, pure and simple from Wrex as Shepard shook her head in his eyesight.

"You'll break the Normandy before you two go down."

True, perhaps, as Mai wiped the synthetic fluid off her blade and wondered how the walkway didn't break beneath her for a moment, the team making the long way around to link up back to her. The cavern had been a rather vertical affair, on the far wall-

"This cave is not a natural formation." Shepard rattled off, leaning on the railing to get an eye full of what seemed to be stacks and stacks of shielded entry ways, the size of some hanger doors by her account. They shone blue from a silver, metallic structure, so unlike the reds of the rock, the rock itself seeming to have formed over the structure.

Tali agreed. "Seems those ruins came first, and the cavern formed around it."

The amount of time that would've taken for rock to overtake anything? A Prothean amount of time, perhaps. These were Prothean ruins. An elevator had lain at the end of the walkway, Shepard gesturing at it. With all aboard, Shepard had thumbed down on its controls, the squad looking across at each of those shielded compartments. Garrus had blinked several times as he had a thought.

"It reminds me of the archives. On the Citadel. The Council keeps historical artifacts there."

"We looking at a bunch of vaults, Turian?" Wrex prodded.

"Maybe." Garrus could guess. "Rather empty though."

"Miners took them, maybe?" Tali wondered as the elevator proceeded down and deep.

Shepard shook her head. "I doubt there was anything here," She looked over to JD. "If there had been, the Normandy would've been here instead of Eden Prime, eh?"

He shook his head in good jest, checking his weapon. He had enough of ancient aliens for his, technically, two lifetimes.

"I'm sorry, Commander." Tali started almost urgently, "I should've forwarded you my intelligence on the Geth. Troop archetypes, things of that nature. That spider like one you grabbed? I think we call it a Stalker on the Flotilla."

Shepard had nodded, thumbing the chin of her own helmet. "I noticed a few different versions. Color patterns, weapon types. I'd be glad to go over your notes when possible."

Mai peered over the windows of the elevator, looking down. Not a drop even she would want to try. At least Jorge had equipment for a drop from orbit. She also saw something else. "Drones." The elevator had come to a stop on a transfer walkway between it and another elevator.

Mai had stayed in the elevator lining up a shot as the rest of the team went to cover, a pair of drones rising up to meet them.

Against that much firepower, they were no-factor as soon as they appeared, one drone spiraling into the steel of the ruins.

"Sterile white." Wrex flared his nostrils. "Protheans sure knew how to make things homely."

"I suppose homely for you is Tuchanka?" Garrus had gotten in a jab to the Krogan.

"One day." Wrex sounded oddly reflective. "One day."

"Move up to the next elevator." Shepard motioned with her hands, the team going as the button was hit, their guns at the ready as they neared the bottom.

All them had their doubts their combined weights was healthy for the elevator, and all those doubts manifested in some sort of combined yelp as the elevator buckled as they approached the floor of the cavern and the last of the shielded chambers of the ruins. It hadn't been their weights that broke the elevator. Not as much as the broken railing of the elevator, the walkway beneath and intended for it buckled from some earlier collapse. The elevator had jerked to a stop just barely above the wreckage of the elevator's bottom frame, a tolerable enough drop as Shepard hung her legs out of an opening and fell forward onto the platform before the final ruin.

The rest of the team followed, clambering down destroyed walkway before standing face to face with two things: a blue energy shield, blocking their way into said ruin, and a blue alien.

The blue individual heard the elevator and called out before the team could make out who it was: "Uh… Hello?! Could someone help me please." Her voice had been sweet and kind sounding, but no less distressed as the wavy distortions of the shield gave way to someone very obviously in need of help: floating in the middle of the chamber, held in a bubble of some intangible energy.

She was coherent, looking at her would-be saviors past the shield on her end, craning her head down. "Can you hear me out there? I am trapped! I need help."

Mai had privately decided that all Asari looked the same, but Shepard could tell otherwise. "Liara T'Soni I presume?" She lowered her rifle.

Liara let out a breath of relief. "Thank the Goddess! I did not think anyone would come looking for me."

Without turning around Shepard had pointed at JD and Mai, two fingers held up, making a circle, before pointing behind her. _Secure the area_.

They understood, fanning out.

"This thing I am in is a Prothean security device. I cannot move, so I need you to get me out of it. All right?"

Shepard had her fair share of touching Prothean objects, she even hesitating to lean in to the shield. "How'd this happen?"

Liara had been more than willing to answer. "I've been here for the last half-year exploring the planet when we finally found this place. The mining company my fellowship paid for left a few weeks ago after all was done, and, well- the Geth showed up! Can you believe it? Geth beyond the Veil!" Quite frankly everyone there could believe it. "I tried activating the defenses, but, when I turned it on I must've hit something. I was trapped in here. You must get me out, please."

"Of course," Shepard left no doubt about that. "How long have you been in there?"

"Oh, it's so hard to tell… What's the date?" Shepard gave it. "Oh my. About a week and a half."

Given Asari's long life-expectancy, they, as far as human standards went, could survive without their needs. Not that long however, Liara more than thankful she was saved.

Wrex had leaned into Shepard's side, turning away. "You know, leaving her might be a good interrogation tactic, if she's allied with Saren and her mother." It was a whisper, but only by Krogan standards, Garrus hearing that full and well.

"Why'd they send Geth here then? They seemed to be attacking her." Garrus defended.

Shepard wouldn't have it. "She needs our help either way she whispered back." She turned back to Liara. "We'll help you out. Got any pointers?"

Liara tried to nod, but her being held in stasis was hardly accommodating. "Why yes, there's a control in here that should drop the defenses and the barrier curtain. I don't know how you're going to get here, but be careful, there's a Krogan with the Geth. They've been trying to get in here too."

Wrex's eyes opened. There was a sense that this was personal now.

Gunfire broke out from behind them all.

"Contact. Light resistance."

The sound of the synthetic metal of a Geth being punched through reverberated through the cavern, the entire fighting stopping in a burst of a few seconds. "If there's a Krogan, he's mine." Wrex used his comms, hoping JD and Mai would abide. Such a promise couldn't be made by them as Wrex charged off to see what was happening.

There was a small encampment, repurposed by Liara as her lab in the back, behind a larger mining laser. Briefly it had turned into a zone of firefighting, but Mai and JD alone dealt with them.

As if she was breaching a door, Shepard had looked at the rims of the blue barrier. No visible weakness she could see, looking down and around. This was the last exposed chamber it seemed. Looking past Liara it seemed to be a central access elevator shaft.

"I make no promises I'll keep this place in one piece." Shepard made that promise of Liara.

"Nothing's here! It's only an emptied storage vault as far as I can tell."

Garrus made an amused huff, his guess right.

"That mining laser been used yet?" Shepard thumbed over her shoulder.

"No, but using it this deep might be… ill-advised."

"We might not have a choice, Dr. T'Soni. We'll be back." Shepard led the rest of the team with her, down the walkways to the cavern floor to a waiting Mai and JD.

"Clear." JD had forgotten to signal.

"I can see that." Shepard passed them both, the giant, almost comically, drill-like laser emitter had held no secrets to its purpose: chipping away rock from the ruins. "Tali?"

"Yes Commander?"

"You think you can get this thing going?"

Confidence was in her voice. "One moment." There was a control console mounted to it, Tali opening her omni and, impossibly fast, going through security protocols as Shepard looked up at the drill: aimed right where they needed. Down and up was the plan. If these ruins kept continuing down Shepard had a hunch. "Ready when you are, Commander. If you want to fire it."

Shepard with her arms waved the entire group back, clearing the firing zone as Tali slid the controls on her omni to Shepard's. "Fire in the hole."

It was less explosive then they thought, the ground taking cover behind some rocks: a sheer line of lasers going right through rock that had already been liable to give way to a breach. The sound of further rock collapsing onto itself was all Shepard needed to know to quit firing the laser. The rumbling didn't stop when the laser ceased however, going on for a worrying amount of time further before settling. Being at least a mile down in rock, Shepard's nightmare of being buried alive had crept up on her, hurrying to the hole she just made and very much seeing another chamber, no shield present.

"Come on. I'd rather not wait here."

Before JD could follow the Commander and the rest in, Wrex had stepped in his way, Mai, on instinct, stopping as well for him. "You two didn't merc a Krogan, did ya?" They both shook their head. "Good. If anything, I just want to show them what a real Krogan looks like."

* * *

There was an elevator behind the chamber, Shepard had also guessed right. What had paused her had been the electronic signage on it, seen only once before by her. Deep in her mind, quarreling in nightmares. Maybe she had inherited knowledge of the Prothean language as well as she took a breath on the platform and reached out, the interface responding and sending the platform one level up: right behind Liara.

"You know how to read that, Commander?" Tali tilted her head at Shepard as she herself stowed away her own surprised face.

"I guess…?" Silhouetted against the blue of the barrier, it was a graceful image, somewhat, as they approached Liara from the rear, nothing separating them but whatever the security system kept her hoisted. "I tell the egg-heads all the time superior firepower works."

Liara forced a laugh, being said egg-head before souring, "I heard that rumbling, let's hope whatever you did didn't set off some seismic events."

There was another interface in the room alongside what the Prothean equivalent of a console was. One button from its outstretched interface seemed inviting enough, Shepard pressing it as her mind eased her. Was her subconscious translating the text of the interface for her?

It was no matter as Liara was freed, hitting the ground in a light thump. A squeamish grunt came from her, unused to walking after so long, but she found her bearings, finally turning around and greeting her saviors. "Thank you so much."

The entire squad had their way of saying no big deal. Mai most of all just not saying much anything as Liara's sweep of the crew lingered on her. In all her years she didn't think humans got that big.

"Elevator we took in is broke, you think that one back there will take us up?"

Liara nodded fiercely. "Yes, I believe so." She moved to greet them properly, the least she could do. She was as tall as Shepard, but it still put her below the height of the rest of them bar Tali. Handshakes exchanged, individual thanks. It was the least she could do at the moment. "Why'd you come for me? Did the university send you?"

Shepard shook her head. "Council business, Dr. T'Soni. I need your help and-" Again, rumbling, this time more rocks heard out in the cavern coming in. "And we'll discuss this more on the ship."

First impressions didn't hold much water, given the circumstances, but Dr. T'Soni came across like any number of scientists. In that mean galaxy, the unkind and the banditry tended to hunt for them, even without the threat of Geth or Reapers. Mai and JD certainly had no opinion, given the fact she, out of anything else, looked more or less human.

She was over a hundred years old, and yet she looked no older than her mid-twenties.

Still she was wise as the slight vibrations started turning much more ominous than natural, the entire group of them heading back to that service elevator. Liara stared at the controls for a blank moment before turning to Shepard. "You know how to decipher Prothean?"

Shepard didn't know the answer, "I'll explain later Dr. T'Soni." Punching the controls again, there was nowhere to go but up as the rumbling began to turn dangerous.

"You think some dumbass archeologist will dig us up in another thousand years and call us Prothean?" Wrex mused as he looked up, the elevator fast, but nothing felt fast enough in their conditions.

"Hitman 1-Actual to Normandy. You anywhere close Joker?"

Static, but the message eventually broke through as Shepard signaled. "On our way Commander, had to leave a team behind for pickup later."

When the elevator finally hit its top floor, a way out apparent, the shaking had become intolerable as JD was frankly reminded of a pod drop. Still, in their way had been someone who hadn't minded the shaking at all. Before they could open their mouths Shepard was about done, even with her rifle ready. "I don't know if you noticed! But this whole place is coming down!"

It was a Krogan battlemaster, by Wrex's mark, his face contorting into disgust. His scales had been green, his armor newer, better, and yet… Shepard hadn't realized how old Wrex looked until she found one who had clearly been younger.

"Surrender. Or don't. That would be more fun." Every Krogan worth their metal had fought for the fight, and this one before them, Geth in his support, several infantry units behind him, was more than Wrex was expecting as the two recognized each other. "It'd be a shame for Clan Urdnot to lose you, Wrex."

"Why are you working for the Turian, welp? You know what happened last time our people did that?" Wrex pointed up from the concave elevator platform up at the lip where the Krogan and his Geth stood. The combat seasoned had looked for cover as this went on, if Wrex was buying them that time.

The opposing Krogan tilted his head up once. "it's something you would've been behind, Wrex, with how you were in your younger years."

"What then?!" The sound of Wrex cracking his knuckles was more than telling.

The Krogan bared his teeth. "A future for our people. Hand over the doctor."

Shepard had stepped in front of Liara as she gauged the opposition. As long as everyone moved off their Xs, they had a chance. "Not happening." With one free hand she unhooked her pistol, handing it back to Liara. The scientist did a double take, moments passing before Shepard shook it, not even looking at her. At that prompting Liara had no other choice but to take it.

"Saren will get what he wants, human. Way I see it, you're just standing in the way of history."

Shepard had hooked Liara's arm as she broke left immediately toward a supporting column in the room. "Engage!" Her yell had been the order that triggered the fight amidst all the chaos of a mine very obviously shaking itself apart.

Shepard's team had outnumbered them, oddly enough, but their own hesitations made them break into cover. Even Mai. All but one had dove for a better firing position:

The way the Krogan fought against each other, it had always been personal as the two Krogan charged each other, not even shooting, colliding in a clash of armor and bone as their claws dug into the metal ground. Wrestling more or less as the battle around them proceeded out, Shepard more or less hovering over Liara protectively as the rest cleared the area. They would've taken a shot to help Wrex, the Geth falling all too easily, but Wrex's form was large, in the way, as he fought a battle he needed to with his own hands.

Seeing Krogan exchange punches had been about the same as two trains fighting each other other for the same track in opposite directions, each punch enough to dent the ancient steel they were standing on as each time one was beaten back, they collided again. And again, and again, as Shepard's team twisted around and surrounded the pair.

"If one of you take him down, I swear to god you're next!"

The Krogans had been grunting together, given their armor design, their faces taking the most of their separate pummeling.

"We have to go Wrex!" No one had taken a shot as the two rotated each other, arms at each other's head and shoulders as, at the lack of any other option, teeth were tearing into each other, headbutts that made the skulls rattle on those watching. The shaking hadn't gotten any better, almost critical. "Garrus, get Liara and Tali out!"

"Aye Commander, come on!" Everyone else had already been about ready to sprint out without Shepard's orders, when they went, they ran for their lives.

Shepard remained standing, observing the fight, trying to find an opening. "Chief's you too!" She ordered to her own.

Like hell they were.

If Wrex wanted to see Mai take on a Krogan, in any aspect, here would be the time as both her knives came out and she, in that mess of Krogan brutality and force, she inserted herself in as she reached in and grabbed the opposing Krogan's face, tearing back and out as a boot had been put to Wrex's midsection, forcing him away.

The Krogan battlemaster had been surprised, but a fight was a fight, and he rose his fists to fight the intervener. For their size his punches had speed, Mai deflecting one with her forearm down and away as her knives remained in her hand in fists. Her own hand came up as she ducked down, pulling all her force into a jab at where she thought the Krogan's throat was. She guessed well enough, punching into rubbery skin as she felt something snap, the Krogan croaking painfully as he was sent back.

The benefits of having a body able to lose straight up organs had come to challenge Mai as she continued her own moves, Wrex getting off his back and, as the anger of being drawn off drained out of him, he saw what he wanted.

Mai thought the Krogan had reached a hand out as if to stop her. That was before she saw the blue fire. Just as Kaiden had done to her weeks ago, this Krogan did to her now as she froze. The guns of the Krogan had yet to be drawn, but here, against a non-Krogan, it felt fair game as he went for it. Being frozen in her own body, Mai detested it with the rage of stars. She was frozen not just in her armor, but in her body itself down to her even blinking. She couldn't even tense her jaw to grit.

The Krogan had gripped his shotgun at his hip, but a combination of fire from the two other remaining humans had broke his aim, sending the shot over Mai's shoulder as she felt the biotic's stasis on her melt.

She flipped the knife around in her left hand, holding it by the blade as she threw it the several feet distance, nailing the Krogan in the eye. Surprisingly the Krogan didn't do much as his eye was bisected, a blade deep in their head. A testament to Krogan hardiness that Mai had to beat through as she closed the distance and, with her raining knife stuck it through the battlemaster's chin. Too thick, it didn't kill him, the knife only going through to his mouth as his hands came up to Mai's neck and squeezed.

Shepard and JD didn't know if they heard Mai growl like an animal as it happened, her helmet being sent forward as she was choked standing, headbutting the Krogan as she held onto the knife, the force of the hit forcing the knife back through and out, splitting the bottom of his mouth in two.

It was easy when she used her boot to put foot through a Krogan's face, but nothing about this was supposed to be easy as the Krogan finally felt pain in a scream, Mai returning as she held one of the flaps of his exposed jaw and tore that away in a rip. Even that sound was heard about rock and metal collapsing. In the same move Mai had retrieved the knife stabbed into the Krogan's eye as his arms, flailing, had enough control to deliver a punch to her gut.

It had been a long time since Mai felt the winds get knocked out of her, she spitting into her helmet as she was caught between breaths, stepping back.

"Fuck this!" At point blank range, Shepard deemed her sniper rifle as having enough punch to deal with the Krogan, she basically reaching out with its barrel and quickly snapping off a shot, a hole bored in its head as it fell back in a heavy slam. "Let's move it, NOW!"

JD had started running as Wrex took the time to kick the Krogan's body, passing by Mai as she felt her chest. His hand pressed the techsuit between her armor, finger pads pressing down, all he needed to communicate that they needed to move urgently. She responded only by, as he passed, taking his hand and drawing him in, he losing the footing on his feet as he found himself hauled over her shoulder. Shepard only yelped as it happened to her as well on the other shoulder. How fast they could run, Mai could beat by a far margin, racing over walkways as Wrex kept pace. Mai left Wrex to his own devices, but this wasn't the first collapsing cavern he had run out of in his life.

The servos in her legs had strained as the very apparent sound of collapsing behind her started, starting up another mining tube entrance as even she started panting, the natural sickly lighting of the planet seen at the far end soon encompassing them as JD closed his eyes and hoped when he opened the, he was free.

* * *

Mai continued running far after they cleared the facility, back down the hill to the Mako, her grip on her commander and her shock trooper tight, but at no true discomfort for her passengers. They wouldn't complain about being saved.

"Shepard!" Garrus had responded within the Mako, having settled back in, "How'd you make it out?!"

Shepard had patted Mai's back, asking to be let go and down. "We ran." She answered, full and well appreciative of Mai taking her. Out of breath out of fear for her life, Shepard had, when let down on the ground, held her knees, reaching up and patting her fist against Mai's chest. "Yeah. We ran."

Wrex had been winded, but taking it better. His lungs were big enough, staring back at the mine and seeing the great smoke and dust looming from a collapsed ruins.

JD had slid himself out, a little more dignified to not admit he had just been carried like a child out of danger, falling back to his feet, chest to chest with the Spartan. His hand went to his chin before going flat toward her.

She responded only by, as if taking his silent words out of thin air, taking it back within her with a flat hand turned up touching her chest.


	17. 1-11: To Go Home

A/N: Just a heads up, I am a professional writer, and I work on fanfiction alongside my actual work. So if my updating is slow just be sure I'm sparking joy in other works, and bear with me.

Anyway, few review responses:

_RandomReader said:_

_Russia is no continent._

**Yes, I know that, but the implication was she walked across both Russia and the rest of Europe. That and I do choose some words that carry more weight from time to time. I'm a fan of alliteration so you might see some of that pick up from time to time.**

_Guardian of the Inheritance said:_

_I would like some translations for the sign language please! I am not well versed in it. Great job keep it up!_

**For the more general signs, I'll translate, but for the more personal ones, it's part of the experience, but thanks for the heads up!**

_anotherguest said:_

_To me, the way you write Shepherd is much the same, just instead of constantly refering to asari commando training, refering to her travels on earth constantly._

**You know, I see that now, so thanks for pointing that out. I'll develop Shepard more and more, seeing as I do have a whole three games plus some to kick around with.**

* * *

A/N in general: For this chapter, few things I'd like to point out: Yes they are singing the Halo canticles. PLOT DIVERGENCE STARTS HERE. John Shepard is default Male Shep. Also I keep forgetting to mention offhand my character model for JD is Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner. As for Mai? I dunno, Alia Shawkat but with straight, dark hair, 200% resting bitch face, and also fuck huge. I've always imagined her as always eyebrows furrowed with a half-lidded look. I've staved off describing her straight up for several reasons, but generally she's kinda... amorphous? At the moment. Purposefully of course, because many of you keep seeing her as a Spartan, her identity is in constant flux between Spartan and Human, machine and man, etc. I'm a complete hack but that's the gist for that. I haven't read any of the Halo stories with Naomi-010 in them, but I can guess there's probably some similarities between them.

* * *

**1-11**

**To Go Home**

* * *

The galaxy was the same as it had always been. That much Destiny and Karonee could tell as they sat in their chambers, in a holding pattern within the arms of the Citadel. It had been, evidently, the first time a Quarian ship had been back within Citadel airspace ever since the Quarian exile from the galactic community. The amount of fanfare made from it only matched by Lieutenant Commander Shepard's admission into the Spectres. It was an interesting thing to see to Destiny: on how humanity conducted itself in politics and in celebration, something which the Covenant gave them no reason to dabble in within the crusades.

Still, even that fanfare had subsided in time, the galaxy dancing from problem to problem.

"Tell me, Shipmistress," Destiny used his subordinate's lesser title. She was a Fleetmistress, above all, but then again, there was no fleet for her. She tilted her head up from her side of the room at him, as he went over notes by his table, still seated within his hoverchair. "Do you recognize that the Quarians would be using us?"

His voice to Karonee had been muffled, filtered. Given where they were, the peculiarities of their host, during their stay on the Quarian envoy ship they had been suited and armored up. Karonee had borrowed one of the suits of the Elite Rangers, while even Destiny had donned an armor that she herself was not familiar with.

She glanced over at the Prelate, in the shadow of the room, always on guard. She hadn't even that San'Shyuum sleep, as they hadn't even left the room for as long as she remembered. Always on guard, outside of her own tactical knowledge. It was a Human expression she drew upon: She was creeped. The only thing that the San'Shyuum supersoldier had given her was her dignity, if nothing else. Destiny wouldn't dare do his usual tics with her while another San'Shyuum was around.

"I've learned long in my life that no one ever does anything out of the kindness of their being, outright, your holiness." She answered.

"How cold you sound, Shipmistress." Destiny responded with disdain.

For as long as her fleet had been attached to the Long Night of Solace and Supreme Commander Barutamee's command, the Prophet she currently shared a room with had never been shy in his preference for her. She wrote it off, during the first months of her command, as simply the nature of Prophets. She learned better as the deployments went on. A hand left too long on her shoulder, looking for skin beneath her armored plates, the way he had sometimes leaned in, just to feel her breath on his face. It wasn't anything she wasn't supposed to be unfamiliar with. Within the clans and families of Sanghelios, she was prized much for what she had done with her life. The stark impression of domination was apparently attractive for many an Elite male. She was thankful for the Covenant's influence in this regard then, she was deemed to strategically important to have to answer to the beck and call for those who would look for a mate, both on her ship and abroad. The difference with Destiny was that he had been above her in that structure known as the Covenant.

The other ambassadors of the Covenant races had their own quarters, and, as for the crew of that ship, had mostly avoided them, save for the Elites.

Ke Nazhumee had been the main go-between for dialog between the Sangheili and Quarians. He and one of the Quarian admirals, Shala'Raan vas Tonbay, had been acquainted in such a way that the Quarians saw fit as important to, not only the individuals, but their entire race. Questions of Sanghelios, or rather, known to that galaxy as Rannoch, had been bombarded upon the Elites by the Quarians.

She among them had been liable to answer. The Sangheili had many colonies amongst the Covenant, and she was, at the end of the day, one of the few that could call their homeworld their own home. She spoke, in idle moments during dinners with the captain of this envoy ship. It had been a difficulty finding food for the Sangheili, the nuances of diets among alien species not lost on this particular Milky Way, however the Citadel had food shipped up to them.

"Maps," the Captain explained as they passed them around the dinner table, Karonee and Destiny present among the other Covenant onboard. "My ancestors, it is said my home was built near here, tell me, what did you call this place?"

The maps were laminated and preserved, Karonee gingerly touching upon it as she worked away at her stew through an induction port. She recognized it almost immediately because of Reach.

"Vadam Harbor." She answered, recounting of the Covenant's greatest admiral, of which was supposed to be at Reach before the Long Night of Solace evaporated. "The state of Vadam was among the most respected of our kind, one of its sons led the fleets of the Covenant no less then as a divine instrument."

He beamed at her answer, the pride of being that much closer to home within him before his childhood dreams faded and realized a point of her answer:

"Against who?"

On the blood of her fathers, on the blood of her sons, the Covenant had waged a war like no other against a humanity. The one they were beholden to now had known that, and for the safety of galactic sanity, no one else did.

Karonee didn't answer directly. Before the humans, there were always Jackals, treasonous sects of Sangheili that didn't' abide by the Writ of Union, so that is how she answered, but what remained had been an uncomfortable, unspoken truth.

The Alliance knew what they had done, and yet they did nothing to them.

The Divines worked in mysterious ways, and now Karonee was instead embroiled in political intrigue lost on the Sangheili as a whole. Not one of the Councilors had survived on the Solace, and so she had become the highest ranking Sangheili and the keeper of knowledge that would've gone beyond her back in their reality.

Still, some secrets were not held.

"We come from another dimensional plane." Destiny had explained, before the Council, his chair floating in the same spot as the human Commander Shepard had made her case days prior. She was matched, if only because it marked the first time a Quarian had stood before the Council in centuries.

Councilor Sparatus and Valern shared a look of curiosity. Surely the idea of multiple universes was always theorized upon ever since the advent of hypothetical quantum sciences, but for Destiny to explain it outright, after so many questions on the nature of the Covenant and where, exactly, they came from, it floored the Council.

Udina had been given permission by Prime Minister Shastri that okay'd the Covenant explanation, and, for once, the Covenant heeded the words of the human political machine as they sat in Udina's office and were explained the galactic situation. Human expansionism on the Attican had become a hot-button issue that, snidely, all of them there were familiar with on a far more grim term. Unlike the Covenant the Council wouldn't _forcibly_ keep humanity from extending its borders, especially if it made them contend with the pirates and lawless sectors that they themselves didn't want to deal with.

Karonee privately wondered if at least Supreme Commander Vadamee's fleet alone might've been a match for the Council in its entirely, but that issue had only been in her hypotheticals: reaching back to a simpler time she had been stolen from.

Among those issues had been the situation with the arisen Geth.

The fact that the Solace's AI had remained intact had been a curiosity to even the Engineers, but given the size of the Solace it was no surprise that enough redundant systems had been able to preserve the construct. Still, the issue of AI in that galaxy had been further trivial to the Covenant. What people would allow themselves to be overpowered by a machine?

In that galaxy, it had been the inheritors of Sanghelios.

The main Quarian envoy to the Citadel had been a shrewd man, if not well learned in his art of diplomatic relations. It had been such a show: between an exiled people and a Covenant which the Galaxy at large had not yet fully understood its full breadth and grasp.

Of the things that the Covenant knowingly kept hidden had been the fact they had an AI which they would recognize as illegal.

"Just to reiterate," The Quarian envoy repeated, white garb on him flowing in the slight draft of the Citadel tower. "The Sangheili of the Covenant are no more, no less, than natives of the Quarian homeworld in their dimension. Every single race of the Covenant has a homeworld in this galaxy, not yet discovered by any of the Council races. It would therefore be pertinent that with the arrival of these people that the Quarians be allowed to start proceedings of an adjacent alliance meant to return the Covenant to their native domains as they manifest in this galaxy."

"And why the Quarians?" Tevos had asked the Quarian envoy.

He had an answer. "The Flotilla is perhaps the most prepared to host the Covenant and deliver them outside of the Alliance sphere of influence. Although the Alliance graciously accepts and harbors the Covenant at present, the arrangement is far from permanent."

"Do you know how outlandish that sounds?" Councilor Tevos said again, looking to Destiny. "That an entire civilization, with the amount of you that have been reported, have traveled across a plane known only in theoretical physics, and ended up here?"

"And of what other explanation can you account for, Councilor?" The Quarian had stood off to the side, his imperial like garb reminding all of what the Flotilla had turned into in the generations of wandering. Destiny had spoken in place as if speaking to Truth himself, and in that sense: emulating the Hierarch here and now. "That millions and millions of people ended up on a human colony of their own ambition? That this was a calculated and intelligent maneuver?"

The Councilors kept silent, looking to themselves, giving each other eyes. It was madness, and yet random.

"And what is it you want, petitioning alongside the Quarians?" Sparatus pressed. The same thing anyone would want.

Destiny answered: "To go home."

* * *

Ambassador Udina sat on a private line in his office, a conference call between Prime Minister Shastri and a Ryder. Not the one that had caused his predecessor so much of headache, but rather, his daughter:

"They told the truth. Both of them." Sara Ryder spoke as she sat in a hijacked office on Altis to her comm console. "The Covenant War, the Covenant themselves, their warfighting techniques and their timelines. All of true from what I could gather."

Sara had spent the good part of the last week combing through any data archive she could from the Savannah: without an interface device made by the Alliance, she had become one of the very few to interface with one of the few pieces of resources given by Mai Gul herself: her data pad. It had been the only device able to interface with any of the surviving data pathways on the Savannah, and with it, Sara Ryder had learned, verified, and confided in Ambassador Udina and Prime Minister Shastri an inconvenient truth.

The showdown within his office had made the secret of Gul and Durante's survival known to the Covenant now, but secrets upon secrets were taken, held, and brought to an understanding as time went on.

"We are currently hosting a religious hegemony that has, for the last thirty years, has devoted itself to the death of a human race." Prime Minister Shastri tiredly repeated. "And were winning."

He didn't quite understand the Spartan's drive to go back fighting an entire planet's worth of them, but for the shock trooper, he had empathized more. If it made him tired beyond words, he wondered how he as a regular man took it.

Udina looked out the balcony to the Presidium from his desk chair. The return of the Quarians had been met with much fanfare: mostly protest, a whiplash from Humanity's moment a few days ago. Multiple Quarian captains and leaders brought along with the Covenant had been making statements to any news reporter that would listen: championing, in the face of a new Geth uprising, a return of a chosen people to their holy land. Alongside them: muscle. In the form of Brutes and Jackals, Hunters and Elites. Humanity and the Alliance might've been host to the Covenant on Altis, but truly, it had been the Quarians that captured them.

It was with a certain amount of dread that it had been reported that the Flotilla itself would be making its way to Altis in the coming weeks: the first visitation of the vagabond fleet into human space.

"The Covenant will never leave Altis entirely," Sara had reminded them. "The Solace would never be given up by them for us to freely investigate. Even my inquiries were stopped wholesale by even the Unggoy."

The correct name of their species had been the first reported, however their offhand names, they had been spreading. Both by the volition of the Alliance and by the Covenant themselves.

"I believe it would be in our interest for the Quarians to offload some of that population unto themselves." Udina, even as an ambassador, had still seen the immigration reports and defense spending of the colonies. "We'd risk Altis becoming an independent planet entirely to an alien species who has not gone to war with us yet to save face."

More importantly, leaving less to establish an independent planet within human space. Mai, upon her subsequent hours of debriefing, had revealed that Altis had been known to the UNSC, but abandoned as any sort of strategically important sight as the war dragged on. There had been suspicions then that perhaps the Insurrectionists would create a hideout there, but such efforts to prove or disprove it were better spent against the Covenant.

Even if they did anything to contain the Covenant, the reason could not be explain without a further breakdown that gave the Covenant the right to continue to war: The Alliance brass had known that the Covenant, as they were known to the UNSC, were an apocalyptic threat that mirrored perhaps the Rachni and Krogan of years before. For the Council to realize that now, it would bring the Council within Alliance space in ways that humanity wouldn't stand.

The Covenant had known that the Alliance knew, and vice versa. So the secret pact kept between them, muttered only in subtle cues and hushed mentions, was that they would keep that from the galaxy, else ruin come to both of them. And in any event, the religious crusade that the Covenant had been on had been for one humanity, not theirs, as cruel as that sounded.

"We would give a potential enemy ships, transport, allow them to hide from us into the galaxy… and that is the better option than keeping them locked to one planet?"

"For us to do that, would be to admit them as our prisoners, Donnel. And no state of war exists between the Covenant and the Systems Alliance… We have no history save for the month and a half we've known each other."

And yet the history went back further: transcended time and space and political affiliation.

Humanity and the Covenant were tied together.

"What have you dug up about the UNSC?" Shastri asked Sara. "Their tech and gear?"

"The Ardent Prayer offloaded much of the UNSC load it had before it began refit by the Solace." The Covenant frigate had taken again to the water and tended to. Being the sole starship of the Covenant now, some of the Solace's higher quality components had been given over, the Solace itself being cleaned of its wreckage and put in order. If it was to become a city at sea, the Covenant did it as dignified as they could: with the efficiency that was only rivaled by the Rachni. Slowly, ever slowly, the main colony on Altis had become a Covenant city, and for the first time in its thousand-year history, became intermingled with humankind. The Alliance who remained were there for security and to study the Savannah. "The slipspace drive is an anomaly, but it is what we're focusing on most."

"I presume the Covenant refuses to cooperate?" Udina guessed.

"We're keeping interactions to a minimum." Sara answered. The Jackal Kaal Roth had been more liable to speak to her as he gave his guidance within the Savannah's hull, but then again he had been paid by the word it felt.

"What's their goal then?" Udina had always known, there was always an ulterior motive.

"To go home." Shastri repeated Destiny's own words from his Council hearing.

"Their own universe, or their planets?" Udina asked again.

Every Prophet had a way with words, and that was a lesson being learned by the Alliance day by day. "We don't know, but we just have to assume," Shastri spoke as a former soldier, a man of military blood. "That if they mean us harm, they cannot afford to do it now."

There was a pause on the line, one that Sara only filled in with technical details, reports of weapons salvaged and sent off-world to research sites: both Covenant and UNSC. The most intact examples of the Sabres had been among the first sent off for research and study, followed closely by the Slipspace drive. The Council had not yet known of the UNSC, too enthralled by the Covenant to even be considering that they hadn't been the only ones brought over.

"How long till that secret breaks then?" Udina was always a pessimist, but it was what made him good at his job.

"Whenever it becomes inconvenient." Shastri answered truthfully. "Lieutenant Ryder, keep up your studies alongside the rest of the research staff. Udina, we have to keep playing this by ear. Let the Covenant do what they need to do, but any negative rhetoric toward us you reel them in and tell them the score."

"Is that really the best we can do?" The ambassador answered.

"Not without things getting a lot more complicated right now. The colonies are already in a fit and our military is already strung out preparing for the Geth. For us to act on a war that wasn't our own right now, against a entity that isn't at all interested in engaging with us right now? We can choose our battles."

Choosing a battle had felt more like choosing a war, and unfortunately, it's what was easiest for Udina to come to terms with as he replayed back Destiny's and the Quarian envoy's proposition to the Council:

Destiny spoke before the Council for what felt like hours, speaking of the Covenant as a singular people, nothing of their individual species and races. It was with this that was foreign to the galaxy. For all the history and the relations between the different races; the animosity between Turians and Humans, the reverence between the Drell and the Hanar, the historical bad blood of the Krogans against all, anything looking like that was not present with the Covenant.

The Covenant was what the galaxy would've looked like if totally unified in a way.

There was a reason behind that.

"And what of your gods?"

"The Forerunners." Destiny answered, freezing for a moment as his arms held his chair tight, clearing his long throat. In the echoes of the Citadel, the song of ancients had hummed, and then sung from a voice. It came from Destiny first, the chanting of ancient scripture, speaking of the Sacred Rings. Though he was not alone in that room. The Elites, the Brutes, the Grunts, those that came to represent their species, watching from the wings, had joined in chorus. A perfect harmony not seen in politics or song in that tower in ages. Not possible by those who had known it before.

Their voices echoed through rock and metal and time. A timeless chorus, joined and sang of victory everlasting through reclamation and a mantle of responsibility. This was how it was shown to the Council and its politicians as they all stood and were immersed by the sound of god.

"What was that?" Tevos asked softly of Destiny. "Was that a demonstration of your Covenant?"

"The Covenant is an agreement between no less than eight species toward a common goal of reclamation through our inherited right. Your Protheans, those form which you have inherited, are not our gods."

Sparatus had flicked his mandibles, deep in thought, he and Destiny locking eyes as words were coaxed out of the Turian. "We've had reports that your religious adherence spreads in such a way that would hint at… assimilation… And yet you recognize that your Gods are not present here?"

Destiny cocked his head before answering tersely. "Does faith have to waver with a lack of proof? Is that not the definition of faith? Are we, by your definition, unworthy of faith?" The Quarian envoy was visibly uncomfortable, drawn back by Destiny's explanation of the Covenant at its core, but, who was he to say? Was Rannoch not a holy land to him? "Spirits and Goddesses, Homeworld and Protheans, from what I have read of this galaxy, you have not made a faith of the one unifying force that unites you all. This opposed to us."

His long fingers gestured at the tower, at everything: from the Citadel itself, to the Relays, to Mass Effect fields and the Protheans that came before. He was right. The Forerunners binded the Covenant together not as just the means, but also the ends. In this galaxy, no consideration was given to that fundamental fact of galactic standard by ancestral inheritance.

"There is still much we do not understand about the Covenant, or its member races." Valern ran his own finger by his chin.

Fair, Destiny conceded: "No more than perhaps the average citizen of our own people know of their neighbors, perhaps, I don't expect you to fully understand each one of us and what we have brought to the Covenant: what is needed to be understood is that we are a Covenant."

There had never been an effective rival to the Council in its several thousand-year histories, but the Covenant had emerged with the promise that they had eclipsed them. Destiny spoke down to the most powerful people in the galaxy.

"It is our understanding that the Solace was a warship. The population which it carried dwarfing many colonies in size. Each individual a soldier. By taking on the Covenant and hosting them yourselves, do you recognize you also accord yourself with the military power unofficially recognized by the Council?" Sparatus had spoken like a Turian to the Quarian envoy.

"As opposed to allowing such a proposition to be held by the humans?" The Quarian held his hands up, playing on the obvious ramifications that no good, true blooded Turian would allow in any pretense.

Tug of war. Manifesting in the fate of the Covenant. Some of the Admiralty had been willing to let the Covenant become hosted by the Quarians instead, given the truth of their nature. Some had argued the exact opposite, but the knowledge they had was never revealed to the Quarians, and, for all intents and purposes, the Quarian claim on the Covenant had manifested in something as holy to them as the sacred installations of the Forerunners had been to the Covenant: a homeworld.

The Quarian pointed at his feet, as if pointing at non-existent footprints left behind by the Council's newest Spectre. "Commander Shepard is currently embroiled in the task of stopping Saren and the Geth. We too can assist in the effort. If Shepard is chasing after Saren, we can eradicate the Geth by going back into the Perseus Veil."

Destiny continued in step with the Quarian envoy. "And that world which the Geth now occupy, the Quarian people have accepted that in this particular exception of events, that they now share their rightful claim to it with our Sangheili. The Covenant would support one of its oldest member species."

"For three centuries," The Quarian envoy had curled his fists and held them to his chest, to his heart, looking to the only Council member to have been alive then: Tevos hadn't sat on the Council when the Citadel of yesterday had barred the Quarians an embassy, and had outlawed them from re-engaging the Geth out of fear of provocation. "My people have abided by a sentence we never deserved, and you have imposed."

"Your people-" Valern has spoken out but was cut off. The Quarian almost hissing at the Salarian.

"My people are the Quarians who live today! If the sins of my forefathers were deserved, so be it, but we carry not the weight of making that mistake, just the stigma placed upon us by a galaxy who now, as we offer to do right, give us no recourse."

There was a certain wonderment to Destiny, he reaching out an arm to the Quarian envoy, his voice ran hoarse as he felt as if he was screaming at god. Destiny had been the only San'Shyuum seen, the rest of his species population safely nestled within the Solace restricting and reorganizing the command structure all the way down the Brute and Elite children onboard.

His tone was cordial, homely almost. "We have come here today, honorable Council, in two parts. In one part: to recognize us. Both Covenant and Quarian. There is a certain kinship that we understand amongst ourselves that we are far away from our homes, and, even if we do ever return there, will never be the same. If that is something the Galaxy needs to understand the Covenant, for what you may think of us now, I encourage you to. But on the second part: The Covenant is here to do nothing more than aid this galaxy that has, from the human soldiers who found us first, to you, Councilors, give back."

To act as the superior: humanity had known what it felt like to be spoken to by such. Shepard intimately knew from the fact she was now subordinate to the Council. It was how the power dynamics worked in that galaxy, doubt thrown in its face by a union that did not abide, and did not need them.

Telos sucked in spit through her teeth. The Council needed a break period, but not on that note. "Normally species new to the galactic community are humbled, reserved, understandably. To be revealed that the stars are not empty, and that they have started at the bottom of a ladder's rung, it changes newcomers… However, you, the Covenant, are the first exception in this entire galaxy's history. You are no stranger to the stars."

Karonee tipped her head up at the ceiling as Councilor Tevos explained how they viewed the Covenant as a whole. Were it so easy to just have gone back to war with the humans. To be obliterated. Either in that galaxy or in her own, war was simple.

One of the human diplomats had brought his child along to these proceedings, the little creature silent, its proper teeth not even grown in and not even able to stand at its own command. Sangheili children had been different. Out from their eggs, they still would have their protective scales, their mandibles ready, even if somewhat ineffectually, to wave off predators of the Sangheili ancient past. Of the first things they ever learned, from how to walk, to talk, to read, and to listen, the most important of all had been how to fight.

There was no fight in this baby as he was held by his father, the young human's arms around his father's neck as their head rested on his shoulder, away from the Council and the speaking platform. With that, their shiny eyes looked directly at Karonee, in wonderment and awe. Something that she hadn't known from humans that long, a new feeling evoked only in the past month. This was the first human baby she'd ever seen, and, secretly, she admitted they captivated her more than the proceedings. She stared back at the child, and it flubbed with its lips at her.

Tevos continued. "Your arrival goes against every standard and every guideline we have on the introduction of new races to galactic society, so if you shall demand this recognition, this permission from us to be involved in such societal issues, then you would give us time to private discuss and then reconvene."

The Quarian envoy bowed, but stopped halfway by a gesture of Destiny's hand, pausing the entire Council and the audience. He would have one more thing to say:

"We ask only to help this galaxy." The fleshy, whisker like growths at the fringes of his mouth bobbed in its old, flesh colored ebb. "Should I expect to be denied?"

The Council had no answer as they shuffled uncomfortably out to their chambers and offices to consider that very idea: by their grace, the Quarians and Covenant would start a war on their behalf in the face of Saren. Destiny's tony had sounded of innocence, of elder wiseness at the same time, and yet it was a learned art.

For too long before the Age of Reclamation, the San'Shyuum that would become the Prophet of Truth often confided in his closer compatriots: That the adherence of a certain religious archetypical relations between the Covenant Council's politics and the Great Journey had lessened the two. To become a master of politics he had needed to recognize it as separate from the religious connotations, of which he also still tightly abided to. Of those he confided this into had been Destiny. Here in that world, the skills of the war that Destiny crafted had been of bureaucratic wonder combined with the grace of sermons. It was very easy to argue policy or requisitions when the confidence of word was backed by god.

The Quarian envoy had commented on this as they returned to his ship. Destiny only playfully dismissed such observances. He was simply telling the truth of his intentions.

The next time the Quarians came to him and Karonee then, there would be no playful distraction.

Admiral Tonbay had arrived with the captain of the envoy ship, the envoy, and a host of other representatives of the Quarian leaders. Entering the given quarters of Karonee and Destiny, the Prelate had shifted his stave defensively before Destiny gingerly waved him down. Several of the Elite Rangers deployed with them as guards had flanked the Quarians.

"I was hoping to speak with you, Prophet of Destiny, Shipmistress Karonee." Tonbay had sounded weak, but she had been, regardless, recovering from her exposure to Ke. It spoke to some simplified genetic immunity that the Sangheili had with the Quarians naturally. She walked in with a cane, leading the group, still, obviously weak at the knees.

"I presume then," Destiny waved at her assistive tool as his hover chair rotated from the desk he had been relaying notes with. "That this is important?"

"It is nothing that we haven't promised you prior." The envoy had spoken with a nod.

"Oh?" Destiny answered.

Karonee had moved off her own chair to meet the congregation. She had been, more than once those last few hours, forced to shake hands in a seemingly customary greeting of galactic society. It hadn't just been humans now. She bit back the motion by settling her hands behind her back.

"We first got your attention on Altis by mentioning what we could offer you, the Covenant." Tonbay continued. Destiny and Karonee very much remembered such promises, the two tilting their heads urging her to continue. "Just as your people have been true to their own word in assisting us and joining us by our side as we re-enter the galactic stage, we would be true to ours."

A data pad had been offered to the closer Karonee, of which she had taken, her eyes going wide as her new omni-tool automatically translated the text on it to her own tongue.

"If you help us take back our Homeworld in any capacity, then it would only be right then, that we give you that which we wouldn't need anymore."

A tempting offer, one which they immediately asked for time to consider. Of course they would've said yes to it, and, at the very least, the Quarian admiralty had more or less agreed to it given the increase in manpower and combat prowess they would far than make up for what was being traded. Though there was a danger in tying into relationships, even out of convenience. At least their current truce with the humans had been built on some aspect of dealing with a devil they knew.

"Shipmistress?" Destiny had said as soon as the doors were closed behind the Quarians.

"Yes, your Holiness?"

"How many worlds have you Glassed?"

She remembered how she became the fleetmistress that she was: through blood and glass. "Three. Lain siege to and recovered any of our Holy relics before we would burn them."

Destiny's voice turned dark, low, unturning as he looked at the data pad as well. "So you know, better than most, what it would take to invade a planet?"

Sanghelios. She was, it seemed, one of the few Elites born there, nowadays. It had been her homeworld. To be now told to do the unthinkable to it, to a world she had held in her heart, not only as an individual, born and raised, but as her species' homeworld…

She was still an Elite in the Covenant however, and thus she took orders from the Prophets. "The longer we would wait, the weaker my troops become. If we shall proceed with this action, then we have to do it now, soon."

"What do you need?"

Karonee thought long and hard about this. How often was she given the expediency of the Covenant logistics lines? Her fleet had been only moderate in size, a great deal lesser than the Solace itself. Though it was a task here and now she was granted.

"Time." She decided. "The Quarians have already offered my people passage on some of their ships deploying their people on their coming of age ritual. If some of our people follow them, learn the Geth threat firsthand, it would allow us to draw up battleplans, all while we retrofit a portion of the Quarian fleet to act within our guidelines."

The complement and weapon stores of the Solace were still ready and waiting. They were in the middle of invading the human fortress world of Reach, after all. The amount they needed to invade Reach, they could've subjugated an entire system.

"Are we capable of making a borer?" The Covenant equivalent. Destiny asked.

Karonee hadn't been an engineer, but she had Engineers. "I believe we should base it off of the Ardent Prayer's borer, and siphon fuel from the Solace's reserves." Another thought. "That and we would have to do it entirely in house. Given the nature of their FTL, our Slipspace drives would give us an immense tactical advantage in all aspects of naval degree."

"Well it's why we sabotaged the drive we gave back the humans."

"Hmph."

Karonee hadn't been told as such when her troops delivered the human cargo back to them. How pitiful it was when she caught a glimpse of their recovery efforts of the Savannah. They had no idea what they were doing, and any inward thoughts that this had been a long trick of devilry by the humans had gone away as they struggled to understand the UNSC frigate.

"What of the Ardent Prayer itself?" Karonee stared out the window at the color of space. How she longed to be out there, exploring that new, yet old galaxy. To see what it was like to travel without war.

Destiny's tony lightened. "Why do you ask?"

"I wish to travel with it, for a time, along patrol routes. Conduct my own surveillance and operations."

"It is certainly a risk." Even with his lack of knowledge of doctrine, it seemed risky sending the only spaceworthy, pure Covenant ship away. "Would you wait until we are guaranteed local transport?"

"Of course. And I say this with my own observances here." She gestured to the window. "If this is the capital of galactic society, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that the military ships we see here today are, in a sense, the best of their kind."

A pause, the light of the cloud the Citadel was in emanating through that room like a heavenly gas. Such light tended to reveal people as Karonee went to it, looking further out.

"You are looking for a fight, Shipmistress?"

Elites were born to fight, and with that, she nodded.

A new Age was upon this Covenant. Not of Reclamation, not of Discovery, but of Destiny.

* * *

It was understandable then why Mai had been the last to arrive from gearing down to the comm room for debrief. Though it was because of her armor that it had made her become unrecognizable.

The door opened, and a woman the crew had, in some aspects, had not yet seen was there. Shepard had barely remembered what Mai looked like on the shuttle ride up to the Normandy from Earth, but here, in the middle of the deployment, finally unburdened by her armor, her image was striking.

None there save Shepard or JD would recognize her outright, and yet who she was was easily identifiable after the moment of confusion. Garrus and Tali shared a look as, at once, they both realized standing in the doorway, and then making her way into the comm room, had been Mai herself.

She was, and remained, the largest human any of them there had ever seen. Tall by a measure barely natural, her arms and legs barely constrained by her uniform, and, even below the clothes, the black underlay of her techsuit remained. Her hands remained hidden, as was the rest of her body save the neck up.

Her eyes had been sunken in, the whites of them harboring blue irises that burned to look at on a face that was as a stone: cold and unmoving. The impression of the uncanny valley applied to something that had been very much alive.

Mai had looked to Shepard. "Ma'am." With her voice it only confirmed who she was to those who had doubted.

"Grab a seat, Chief Gul." Shepard had offered the one open next to JD. He had been the only one used to the sight of her face, even if he hadn't seen it for almost two weeks. When they locked eyes, only, just marginally, did Mai's face soften. With the littlest of nods he had affirmed it, transitioning to holding his face with both his hands, elbows on his knees.

The turnover between dropping on the planet and then getting back shipboard had been jarring, even for him. On Reach it had been terrible. Before the operation to gut the Solace, the Savannah had been around the clock dropping him at points around Reach and then picking him and the surviving ODSTs up for retasking. This hadn't felt much better. The drop was the beginning of what was usually day long ops, where he would be with his gun and squad be stuck on planet until the objectives were done or beyond reachable. The mission was decompression for him, and so now, on the Normandy, he still felt like he was fighting.

He looked around the room though: no casualties, and that had put his heart at ease.

Tali had leaned over to Garrus to his ear canal and whispered. "She's… prettier than I imagined."

"I doubted she was human." He hushed back.

Garrus had yet developed his own definition on what constituted attractive as far as humans went, but he did objectively saw what Tali saw. She hadn't looked like a Krogan, or one of those newly discovered Jiralhanae. Her dark hair had a certain thinness to it that didn't speak to sickness, but rather, it spoke to silk. It had hardly been taken care of, it tied into a pony tail unceremoniously like so many other human women he noticed.

He would've asked Kaiden later about Tali's statement, as both he and the Marine took apart the underside of the Mako.

"Yeah, I mean, I think she does look graceful." He bopped his head around the Mako and made sure neither Chief had been there, "but it's her eyes that take away from that. They're kinda like a shark's."

"She's also like, big." Ashley had joined them, overhearing, as she spoke more frankly, ghosting her own hands around chest, then thigh, then butt, then arm, and then pretty much anywhere there had been a muscle on her. "I mean, that suit of hers don't leave much to the imagination."

Pickup from Therum had been painless as Shepard drove the Mako away from the mine to a pickup point safe from any natural or synthetic threats. During that time JD had hopped in the back and given Liara a run down, praying to god that Asari were close enough in biology to humans for what little medical training he had thrown together since he decided on a specialization to work.

As he waved his omni-tool up and down her form one last time, she seemed okay, but the tell-tale signs of exhaustion were seen on her dry lips and bagged eyes. He reached behind to his armor's bag, drawing out a wrapped-up tubing with a mouth piece.

"Water." He said once, kneeled before her as similarly Wrex had cooled down from his run and Mai, having shown no indication of any stress, tried to fit herself up to the cockpit to man the gun. She couldn't fit.

Liara had been skittish, at first waving off the tube, but JD insisted. She was much too kind to be caught up with what they were doing, everyone in the Mako had pegged as she started drinking from JD's hydration bladder.

She had sucked it dry to Wrex's disappointment, he hoping to grab a sip afterwards.

"S-sorry." She started. "It's been more than a week then-"

JD raised his hands silently, shaking his head as Shepard talked for him, having parked the Mako momentarily as they awaited the Normandy. "Don't worry about it, Dr. T'Soni, we'll get you all checked up back on the ship before we get to anything else."

"Are you a Spectre?" Liara had thought Shepard had said she was on Council business. "I didn't think there were any humans in the ranks."

It was an easy mistake to make as Shepard nodded, getting out of the driver seat and sitting the steps up to the driver's cabin. "Just in the last week, Dr. T'Soni. Council made me a Spectre and put me out on assignment."

"Finding me? What did I do? Why would the Geth come after me?" Liara's mind was going a thousand miles a minute, thinking back to past expeditions and things she might've accidentally touched. It was only now she realized she had been sitting in a combat vehicle with a Quarian barely old enough to register as an adult, a Turian who had been as tired as anyone else, a Krogan battlemaster, and, apparently, two other synthetics-

JD had taken his helmet off as he took back the water tubing, sucking on it once and making sure it was out. His hair had been slicked up by taking it off, oily with his own sweat.

Liara had paused. The man tending to her hadn't been artificial, just a man with an armor system she had never seen before in her over hundred years alive. She looked up at the grey figure across from her. She was less convinced.

"Your mother," Shepard started. "Matriarch Benezia, is involved with a rogue Spectre: Saren Arterius. That Spectre also is responsible for leading the Geth on an attack on a human colony in order to-" Shepard stopped herself. Was it breaching opsec to mention the fact that he was interested in the Prothean artifact they found on Eden Prime?

"In order to what?"

Shepard had answered a question with a statement. "I was told to come look for you, both for your safety and your expertise in the Protheans."

The young Asari's grit her teeth, eyes widening, staying near silent as the Mako was retrieved as she rushed off to med-bay by Dr. Chakwas.

"CO Shepard has returned. She has the con." The Normandy's VI had spoken aloud the intercom as she stepped out of the Mako. The Req Officer and his people had gone over, taking their guns and grenades from them and helping them armor down when pertinent. It had been relatively empty in the well deck, if only because Joker had rushed over as soon as an evac was requested: A good part of Hitman had been left behind on a planet in system momentarily with Kaiden.

"God, there has to be a way to turn that off." Joker had greeted her over the intercom next after the VI spoke.

"Thanks for the pickup Joker." Shepard spoke back.

"Leave me a good review. Now excuse me I have to go pick up Kaiden and Emerson before they start fighting over top dog spot."

"How'd that Op go, Commander?" Ashley had remained on the Normandy, having did her tasking with her own fireteam of Hitman and retrieved before it all went down. The away team had gone to their lockers, cooling down, collecting themselves if needed as the various engineers took a look at Shepard's handiwork with the Mako: dirt and white ooze dripping from its underside, one that Garrus, after breaking open one of his MREs, had taken a closer look at and also grimacing.

"Chief Gul carried us over the finish line." She thumbed back at the still alert Spartan, she and JD taking the post-mission beginning slower than most, almost at a loss. They were given their priorities as she made one last statement before leaving the deck herself. "Away team, comm room in thirty for debrief."

JD had shed his own gear painlessly enough, but Mai had taken some time as they retreated back behind the Mako to their corner of the bay. He pointed at her, only to make a thumbs-up and place it on his other palm, moving it up.

She saw but didn't understand momentarily. "I-uh." She drew her knives. "I'm just gonna de-armor. It'll take a moment." For the first time in days she had taken off her helmet, revealing her balaclava'd face beneath it, her eyes bare to him for the first time in over a week. Her voice became unmuffled and the difference in JD's mind had been night and day. "Proceed without me."

She still had the crease of that balaclava around her eyes, but no one made note of it as they all sat in a circle in the comm room. Distinctly she noticed there were more aliens than Humans in that room.

"Before you get started Commander," Joker again, his voice over the intercom beamed directly into the comm room. "Try not to take us to too many magma planets. The Normandy's venting systems already have to deal with some pretty hot stuff."

Shepard had leaned back into the chair, sighing as a hand wiped down her face. "Not my choice, Lieutenant, you know that."

"Just saying."

Liara had come in first to the comm room with Shepard, waiting for the rest of the away team. She had a relatively clean bill of health. One that could be more or less rectified with a good night of sleep and a hot meal. Shepard had immediately pressed on her if she had left anything important behind on Therum, but it was no matter. She wanted nothing else but to be as far away from it as possible. It was good enough a discussion topic before Shepard had to get into the uneasy meat of things, her own mind spinning on whether or not to out herself as a loon.

"Does a subordinate in a human military often talk like that to their superior?" Liara had turned to Wrex and then Garrus. "I don't have a lot of experience dealing with your species, Commander."

"Yeah, me neither." Shepard had halfway joked. No one had noticed.

"But, regardless. I am grateful to you. To all of you." Liara looked across all the room, seeing the colorful affair. "Those Geth would have killed me. Or dragged me off to Saren."

"No need, Dr. T'Soni, we're just doing our jobs." Shepard had said warmly, gesturing to the team. "If you could introduce yourselves?"

JD rose an eyebrow. A quick icebreaker wouldn't hurt, perhaps, this time. Unfortunately, he had been first in the row, unprepared. "Ah. Uh. Private Durante."

Mai sucked in air into her lungs faster than JD could realize. When he did realize, so did Shepard. "Private?"

"I mean- Chief Jonathon-Jameson Durante." He corrected quickly. Before Shepard could vocalize her concerned look Mai had followed up.

"Master Chief Petty Officer Gul, Dr. T'Soni."

"Garrus Vakarian. Technically I'm a detective from C-Sec but, well, let's just say I'm on break while I'm with Commander Shepard."

"I'm Tali'Zorah Nar Rayya. I am currently on pilgrimage, if you know what that is. I helped the Commander with the Geth."

"Wrex."

Shepard had waited for Wrex to continue, but that was all he gave as he slunk back himself. He was due a nap by his own volition. But without further ado she had proceeded herself. "My name is Jane Shepard, and we need your help."

"My help?" Liara had put a palm to her chest, her lab uniform ruined by dust and burns. "I don't know how I could possibly assist you."

"Saren thought otherwise." Wrex crossed his arms. "Thought otherwise enough to send a Werylock after you." Krogan Battlemasters were rare in that galaxy, and spending money on one had meant something. He would know.

Shepard agreed in a nod. "Saren Arterius has gone rogue. He used Geth to attack a human colony in search of Prothean artifacts."

"Prothean?" Liara exclaimed. Shepard nodded again.

"Your mother was heard directly discussing the attack with Saren, thanks to data recovered from a Geth unit by Tali here."

"My mother?" Liara spoke with an air JD recognized. More than that, spoke with an air Mai even did. It was a type of voice she heard from people who thought owned her. From UNSC or ONI officers who used her for personal vendettas, or the downtrodden on New Jerusalem who needed someone else to stomp on. Liara spoke with an air of privilege. Then again, it was relative:

She was privileged compared to any of them in that room right now.

"Yes. We wanted to know if you had any information on her whereabouts."

The Asari's eyes sunk in as she tried to remember her mother. But the fact of the matter was-

"I'm not close with my mother… I haven't talked to her in quite some time."

Shepard shot a look at Garrus, and he had expected it. If it was a lie, they could easily check later. "I'm sorry to hear… but, in that case…" Might as well. "We need then need your help with Prothean knowledge. Saren has been searching with his Geth for Prothean artifacts."

"Why would he be looking for Geth artifacts?"

"Well," Shepard settled in. Maybe Wrex was going to get that nap he wanted. "We were hoping you could explain."

* * *

In truth, as spoken by Liara, who had been so eager for once to actually have the opportunity to explain her theories on the Protheans, it had been entertaining, if not illuminating. For JD and Mai at least, it provided a lot more tangible context then what could be provided by the Extranet.

Shepard had invited Liara to explain the berth and width of the Protheans as part of the debriefing, ranging from their predicted expanse of their empire to why the Relays were ever set up: left behinds left behind for the very reason of bringing those after them up. They, at least to her, sounded like a proud and noble race. Though her expertise then, as she arrived at the good forty-minute mark of her impromptu lecture, landed at how they disappeared.

It ending on a question. "Why?" She didn't know why, and not out of lack of trying. She had spent decades on her theory. "A galactic civilization does not just instantaneously disappear without leaving a trace of the reason why, and, if such a force is able to do that, can it happen again?"

Each of them there knew why though, hesitant to speak out before Shepard stood up, only to lean on the comm consoles, arms crossed. "What if I told you that force was called the Reapers?"

Liara had been using her omni-tool as an impromptu display to show her notes. "What?"

"A race of sentient machines."

"The Reapers?" Liara tried the name on her tongue, doubt on it. "How do you know this? What evidence do you have?"

The rest of them that hadn't been on Eden Prime, but on the Citadel, witness or hearing of Shepard's trial and case for Spectreship and the mission on Eden Prime heard it mentioned once, and then discarded, but for her to bring it up now, even Shepard herself wondered if she wasn't actually crazy.

"There was a damaged Prothean beacon on Eden Prime that I was tasked to secure. Saren was going after it too. It burned a vision into my brain and I've been trying to sort it out ever since."

For a brief moment, the uninitiated might've thought Shepard insane. Tali and Garrus had that thought cross their mind, but for Liara as an Asari, it wasn't outlandish. It hadn't been when a function like that had been a part of Asari biology ever since their ancient times.

"Visions? Yes… that makes sense." Hearing a scientist say that immediately after what might've constituted as rambling about a progenitor race had been both parts reassuring and also worrying to Garrus and Tali, but then again their lives had taken that sort of turn. JD and Mai had just about been okay with it ever since they had seen Shepard get hijacked and, more importantly, having seen New Jerusalem in her visions, intertwined. "The Prothean beacons were designed to transmit information directly into the user's minds. Finding one that works is extremely rare. Is it still-….?"

"Destroyed unfortunately."

"And you received that information?" Liara had taken steps forward, almost leaning into Shepard. She nodded. "Do you have any cybernetics? Genetic modifications?"

Shepard shook her head, only to lift part of her hair beneath her right ear. There had been a metal slot that led to the base her skull, and then her brain. It had been her biotic implant. Distantly, JD felt for his own standard issue neural chip at the back of his head, feeling the slit that tagged him as friendly on his and Mai's motion tracker.

"I'm pretty clean, Dr. T'Soni, only an amp and implant for my biotics."

Liara was impressed. "I am amazed you were able to make sense of it at all. The beacons were designed for Prothean interface only. If you didn't have the willpower, your mind might've suffered… irreversible consequences."

Shepard was rife with realization then. Perhaps Saren had gone actually insane? If he interfaced with the beacon first, maybe the brunt of it was sustained by him? Questions for later.

"Does the Conduit ring a bell to you?" Shepard offered Liara a seat again, which she took.

It did, she glancing at her notes again. "Only in passing. Mentions of it come up every few years, and the only thing stringing any reference together is that it is a physical thing that you can be in the presence of."

Shepard took back a seat herself, a little more comfortable now that there had been a Prothean expert at least listening to her. She closed her eyes and she saw a starless galaxy. Dark as the biotic powers she used, filled with nothing but horror. "We need your help, Dr. T'Soni. If Saren wanted you, either dead or alive, that alone is reason enough to have you with us if you so choose."

Wrex snorted a laugh and Mai hid a glare. More crew of the non-human type.

"Join?"

Shepard nodded. "I can provide you with what you need, and as we investigate Saren further, I'm sure more references and information with the Protheans will turn up. It'll help us make sense of the Reapers and if they're tied to your theory."

Liara blinked several times, surprised. "Honestly, Commander, the safety alone would be enough."

"And your biotics would be handy I imagine." Garrus tipped up at her. "Assuming you'd get into a fight with us."

Liara rose her eyebrows around the room. Tali answered. "We weren't anticipating a fight when we came to get you."

"Speaking of which." Shepard had returned her voice to a military standard. "All of you did very well today, for the situation we were in. As a fireteam I was more than pleasantly surprised we worked well in clearing out buildings, facilities, and vehicle operations. Now, some of us might be a bit unorthodox, not used to working in teams, but I'd like to make clear that my only complaint that is outright is that we need to eventually get around to trust." Shepard tried not to look at Mai but it was obvious. "If I make a call, please bear with me. If not for my sake, but for your fireteam."

A wave of relief measured throughout the room, the only bump being Mai as Carter's words echoed.

"Just make sure you trust us, Shepard." Wrex had called out, deciding that briefing was about done for him. He had made for the door anyway in his slow walk, about to activate it, but Shepard had paused him before he left.

"I'll be doing the rounds later," She said. "Checking with each of ya. But for now, welcome Dr. T'Soni to the crew, and I'll be doing the mission reports."

It had been something about JD and Mai remaining seated as Shepard had walked out with Liara back to the sickbay that had stayed Tali and Garrus, leaving the four of them in the comm room, a mutual decompression they didn't know they needed happening then and there.

"Did we do good?" Garrus asked to the ceiling, head against the chair.

"I think so." JD answered, chin tilted up at Tali for a moment. "You did good."

There was dust on all of their boots and shoes, from Therum, sprinkled at the floor.

"She was talking about you two, you know." Garrus answered back as Tali took the compliment to heart, thankful. "I saw the way you two push up and, that whole gun trading thing? Spirits."

Elite shields often recharged fast. For JD as an ODST, to push up was the only way to catch them vulnerable. For Mai it simply meant the margin for error had been higher the closer on their part she was to the enemy. "I don't know how that was a negative." Tali spoke.

It was Mai that answered though. "Principle." The one word answered got a noise out of the Quarian. "If the order was to cover a teammate, and instead I neglected and sought my own solution, it might leave the teammate vulnerable. That's the principle of following orders."

Her voice was softer, without the muffling of comms and her helmet. Mature, and yet childish at the same stroke. Her words were shaky, speaking like this, despite her outward propensity for combat perfection and that confidence. Hardly deviating from tone, it was robotic almost. Cold.

"If you two trained me, I don't know if I could keep up." Tali said, surprise on her own lips for having said that. "I know I said I wanted to train to keep up with all of you, but if I have to fight like you? I might just send myself back to the Flotilla if I ever get there. My father always bellyached to me on how we always needed the fighters."

"You were never a cop, right Durante?" Garrus had asked of JD.

"Just been around a lot." Present company included.

"Yeah, I can tell by the way you fight. You two. You both fight like, uh, what's the word in human- I think the Sangheili got the word: Demon." Usze Tahamee was marked by one, and so he knew one when he saw it. Garrus remembered the word from the Elite. "You're both not afraid."

Fear. JD knew fear. He had become accustomed to it. Not the fear of death, but the fear of failure. If he died, he hoped, prayed, it was because someone else was saved for it. That was the death he was looking for.

"How long have you two known each other?" Tali asked on a more personal note. "I've seen you two do that thing, with your hands." Tali tried to gesture herself but couldn't quite emulate. "Is that military language or…?"

Officially the first op Chief Gul and Chief Durante ever went on together had been ship-boarding actions in the days following Elysium, and Mai answered. She wanted to take the lead, JD having flubbed earlier, but she answered in a way she didn't anticipate: in the way that felt right.

"Years." She surprised herself, repeating slowly, almost unsure. "I've known Chief Durante for years."

It felt like she had known him for years, some moments.

To JD, the wording was odd, but he followed up, pointing two fingers up about chest level and rotating them like a bicycle pedal. "It's sign language. Just something to pass time."

Garrus's mandible flicked again as Tali was intrigued.

"Oh." She said, mimicking. "Well, I don't quite have as many fingers so I don't think I could ever."

Perhaps, perhaps not, Mai lost herself in her thoughts as JD noticed, the four of them sitting silently. How, out of all of them did he end up as the most willing to move along and do things normal people did? Like-

"Do you want to grab chow? You's?" He dropped into his father's urban drawl for a moment as the two guests looked at each other and shrugged.

"Yeah, sure. Our meals are stored in the well deck so, meet us down there?" Garrus answered for the two of them.

"Sounds good."

The Turian and Quarian had let themselves out, leaving the two Naval SOF alone for once. Truly alone.

"Private." Was Mai teasing him? She had repeated his true rank on her tongue and he held his face in hands again.

"My bad." He answered, muffled.

"Try not to again." He had moved his head, eyes peeking out from his hands at her as she looked down at him.

"What?" She wanted to say something, her fingers curling as she sat proper, resting on her knees. The silence between them dragged on longer than usual. This time she faltered first.

It was odd, after a time, to see her face as she spoke. He in that entire galaxy had been the one most familiar to her, and yet reading her lips had been hard. He had to read her lips because in this instance she spoke silently, as if holding back. "If they ask, can you not teach them sign language?"

Huh?

JD tilted his head, eyebrow raised. He tilted his chair over to face her.

"Wasn't planning to. Why?"

She paused for a moment, not remembering she had to give a reason. "Privacy, is all."

Her eyes darted to his own knees for a moment as she answered. He might've made a good MP, in another life, or a good cop. How odd that one of the protections of her armor was that that hid her ability to lie.

"Privacy?" He repeated.

"Affirmative." She answered in her military lingo: the language she was comfortable with the most.

"You don't trust Garrus and Tali?"

"It's not that." She answered quickly. Sure, she had been wary about Vakarian, if not on a species level but rather how easily he spoke to JD she noticed and how he and him led Tali through drills in a language she understood. She didn't understand how JD was okay with that. She didn't understand why Shepard would let non-humans free on this ship and let them work in engineering of all things. The fear, the aversion to aliens based on their appearance they could work through, beat through. They killed aliens all their lives.

It wasn't that however, that much was true.

"For them to learn sign language from you, it would feel… unearned." There was a word on Mai's lips that, if she knew to place, wouldn't place. It would be demeaning to her to say and yet it was what she felt. "Sign language is a part of you that is personal. For them to learn it from you like that would cheapen it."

She spoke to the point, harshly. She didn't know any better.

His mother would teach any and all who would take the time to initially know her signing. It was a language without words, those few that knew closer because of it. To know it was a gift. To know it was love, as JD understood it. He, with the privilege of being healthy, of having word and hearing and the patience to learn otherwise, had every right to it, as his mother told him, when he asked one day, unsure.

YOU USE ASL FOR GOOD. FOR LOVE.

He remembered the way she signed it in the dark, sitting on his bed as a child, illuminated by his nightlight.

"I don't think so." JD answered back silently; hands heavy at that moment. "To share is to care. It's why I'm teaching you."

"You care about them?" Mai's head dipped a bit.

"I have to." The words left JD's mouth so naturally. "Or else what would I become?"

A stagnant racist, so easy to draw upon his life experience to justify a hatred that did, more often than not, culminated in the kill? Someone who couldn't move on?

A fate worse than death, when faced with it.

And yet… there was something more to her words. Something he dared to ask.

"Do you hold what I'm teaching you, so dearly to ask something like that?"

What had JD been teaching her? Beyond the sign language, and her reciprocation with Spartan Signs. In the way he spoke, in gentle anecdotes or clarifications brought upon him by a life she was denied. Mentions of what life was like as someone free to live it. Slow, warm, gently, never bragging, never trying to make her think otherwise of the life she was given, but yet, most of all: it was human of him. Very human.

He taught her more than just sign language.

"Yes."

His eyes widened just a little, she licking the insides of her teeth as the guilt in her words was heavy. For her at least. The way her breath stayed; the syllable dragged out as if forcing herself to hear it.

"Just between us then?"

"We should be familiar with such circumstances." Mai clarified. Indeed, she was right. They had shared a world they could not go back to within themselves.

He mouthed okay, if it did mean that much to her.

"Do you want to join us for some food?" He stood, getting ready to leave. She shook her head once promptly.

"I need to do maintenance on my gear." She answered back cooly.

"We're in the same bay, Mai."

"I'd like to be left alone." Was her clarification. What was JD to argue? If this wasn't an Alliance ship, he would've been doing the same. Still, she had a point, buried beneath all of her rhetoric, forced upon her by Spartandom. He was easier to speak with Tali and Garrus than he would've thought. Maybe it was the translators that made all the difference, or the fact they seemed young compared to him (even if Garrus was technically older), but most of all, it was Garrus and him sharing something in common. A Turian and a Human: fathers bleeding blue.

They left together, walking down a deck, separating in the mess, however before Mai had left:

"Hey, we'll go over the alphabet again, later?"

Before the elevator had closed, he had seen a shadow of complacency on her eyes. It was a yes.

* * *

"Asari are stonger than they look. Squishy as they are. She'll be fine." The booming voice of Wrex had startled Shepard a smidgen as she had sat at the crew deck's table openly, some data pads being read through and written through by her. Post-action reports and summaries for both the Council and Alliance. She'd take a Krogan as a distraction as she felt for her mug:

It, corny as it was, had a picture of it of a younger Shepard in her dress blues. Flanked by two other Shepards, also in their dress blues. It was the day she had graduated OCS, on track to go into the N-program. The two elder Shepards had been beaming at their child having graduated, top of her class.

Taking a sip from it, Wrex had noticed. "Your family?" He tried sitting, but the chairs wouldn't have it, he sufficing to leaning on the wall behind the table.

"Yeah." She nodded, pivoting the chair toward him. "Captain Hannah Shepard, and Sergeant Major John Shepard. Both serving on the Kilimanjaro."

It'd been a hot minute since she'd called. Then again that was before she had become a Spectre, before Eden Prime, and definitely before the Covenant landfall at Altis. The Kilimanjaro had been the dreadnought flagship of the Fifth Fleet: Admiral Steven Hackett's personal ship. It led the task force responding to Altis and the Covenant and was subsequently still in the area attached to the Alliance holding fleet led by a Captain Shaw. Communications from the ship had been under lockdown, given the sensitivity of Covenant related activities.

"Would it be fair to say that you've outdone them?"

She chuckled at Wrex's question, a very Krogan question at that. Still there was an answer there. "Some would say. When people say Shepard, it's usually referring to me."

"Is it a common name?" Wrex wagged one of his armored claws. "Shepard?"

"Uncommon. Though there's been times where I've served on a ship with multiple."

It was a feeling to be sure: to be known as _the _Shepard. Offhand she couldn't only recount how many people in history could claim an entire name as their own: One had been the first through the Mass Relay and been a comrade to her mentor. The other conquered Europe in the 40s. A wide gamut to be sure, and hopefully it didn't go to her own head.

Hopefully.

"Need something Wrex?" She called back to him, more than willing to procrastinate. "Proper bedding?"

"Oh I'm fine, Shepard, but since you've been asking everyone to ask you to do something for them, I figure I try something:"

"Shoot."

He motioned to the mug. "What's family to you, Shepard?"

Nothing, then everything. "I'm not sure I understand?"

"Is it the blood of your ancestors, coursing through you? A guide for your life? People that you can always rely on?"

"Perhaps. Are yours like that?"

Maybe another time he'd tell, if Shepard prodded him like she did everyone. He'd tell her about the graves that held betrayal, and a knife through his father's heart by his own hand: an ambush that betrayed his people at their core. He had once wanted to raise the Krogan up from their squalor: the prodigal race that saved the galaxy, only to eat themselves alive after suffering indignities from the Council. For that belief however, he exiled himself, became a mercenary.

"If they were, I wouldn't be a mercenary."

She was meaning to ask. During one leave, a private recruiter for a mercenary group approached her: More money, better gear, more missions than an Alliance tour, they promised. She denied, but the thought of becoming a gun for hire out on the stars was romantic. "Why are you one then?"

"Lots of reasons?"

"Such as?"

"Such as… I needed to get out of Tuchanka. I needed to eat. I needed to survive."

She knew Tuchanka was as much of an apocalypse as any planet still habited in that galaxy, but she didn't know it was that bad. A few of the Marines on guard duty had given her a nervous look, but she had shoo'd them away as they filtered through.

"You couldn't stay?"

"Long story Shepard."

"I have time."

"I'd rather not. But… I could tell you, if you do something for me next time we pass by that station." Pinnacle, he was referring to. Shepard had made a deal with Ahern to transition some supplies there for the Normandy. Pinnacle was placed in a system on the border of the Attican, and if she wanted to maximize time out there, it was a station ideal.

"Sure."

"I had plans, before you showed up, to travel to a planet in Argus Rho."

"To do what?"

"Just business."

"What kind of business?"

"Unfinished."

It wasn't a lie if he didn't tell her anything. "Gotta give me more than that, Wrex. I can't use the Normandy to go do mercenary work."

A sigh pressed by Wrex's throat. "Family."

"Oh. Is it private?"

Wrex shook his head. "Trying to get me emotional Shepard? No. Before I left Tuchanka, I made an oath to my father's father: I swore to recover my family's battle armor, taken from us after the Krogan Rebellions."

"It special?" Shepard pressed.

"No. It's a relic. Useless really. Thought it's the principle of it: Worn by five generations of Clan Urdonot before the war. It's, by right, mine to care for." Right. Right and Wrong. The rights imbued by their creators. The right to take a life. What was a right in that galaxy, generations old, that Wrex acted on? It seemed unlike him. "Now it's in the hands of Tonn Actus. Some Turian scum who collects relics from the Rebellion. He's made millions selling Krogan artifacts that were stolen from my people."

"Done."

"Oh?"

"Done. Just point me in the right direction."

A hint of amusement was on his face. Usually Krogan were hard to read, but it was there for Shepard as he entered some data into his omni. "I'll upload data to your nav system. But, Commander, I make one thing clear."

"What?"

"I want to be there when you find him." Shepard recognized that drawl from him: It was the same as when he was daring Mai.

"Commander?" One of the Marines, turning her head to him, accompanied by Kaiden.

"I should go." Shepard had stood up, collecting her data pads and coffee cups. "I've got a meeting… But I'll keep you posted, Wrex."

He had pushed himself off the wall, a nod given to her. "Shepard." Walking back to the elevator and disappearing down. It'd still been a sight to see.

"Commander Ryder never told us to keep an eye out for a Krogan, ma'am, when he transferred us." The Marine had been Sergeant Emerson: Ryder's number two.

"Well, that's not your responsibility."

Kaiden gave side-eye to the sergeant. "Well, it's why we're here today, isn't it Emerson?"

Apparently the two men had been butting heads as far as fireteam command went. Kaiden had the rank and command, technically, but on the field, Hitman had a tendency to defer to Emerson. To play HR rep, even as a Spectre, Shepard had found humor in it as she motioned to her cabin.

* * *

There were rumors, about twenty years ago in human time, that a Kig-Yar community had integrated somewhat into a human habitat.

Such a thought was heretical, within the Covenant, but as for the Kig-Yar raiders who operated on the fringe, the thought was liable to be explored.

Kaal Roth had been one of those Kig-Yar raiders, and so he had been at relative ease with where he was now. His current assignment was directly communicated to him by the Prophet of Destiny: to assist the humans in navigating the human frigate Savannah. However, it was hardly a pay worth anything. If there was pay at all. All Covenant forms of trade and commerce had been rendered null by their new placement in the galaxy, and their ability to collect credits from the Council economy at all? Stymied at the moment out of security concerns.

"What's that? Out there?" A Turian had asked Kaal at a bar one night after his duties at the Savannah site were done for the moment. A token security force of Council personnel remained; The Doctor Mordin Solus having integrated well enough in them as entire field of science was revealed to them: that is the Covenant themselves. He was approached by the Salarian doctor for questioning and research, but he wasn't going to get paid for it, so declined.

Kaal smoothed the feathers on the back of his scaly neck. "Human oil rig that got damaged during landfall, they're trying to contain it."

He was being paid to keep a secret, that being the Savannah.

"Oh." The Turian responded.

It was nice, Kaal admitted, intermingling with aliens that hadn't seen his kind as just, purely, guns for hire. He was liable to have a nice human drink with them anyway as they told him stories of piracy in their galaxy which he salivated again at. It was the Turian that was chatting with him at the bar that spoke of him the stories of Batarians and mercenaries out in the Attican and the Terminus, the coastal, open air bar providing a view out to the Solace and Savannah sites.

"You work there?"

"Yep."

"Pay well?"

"Nope."

"Want to be paid better?"

"Sure." He had been half-ignoring, and yet half-cognitive of the Turian enough to turn his head as he realized what he said, only to find an empty stool and a running data pad on it, a credit chit on it. But, more than that, there was a promise there.

A promise of new prosperity.


	18. 1-12: Dreams are for Other People

**A/N: **I should be doing a Mai-centric chapter after this from her POV, so keep watch. Anyway not much to say today. Standard chapter.

Review responses:

Monarch Actual said: **"I also completely forgot Mai wore a balaclava under her helmet and when I saw it, I just- I wanted to steal it, but I couldn't do that. Speaking of Mai, though, and JD as well, I'm pleased to finally have a concrete image to put to them for faces, I've always assumed Mai wears Mark V(B), just with a black visor. "**

Yeah Mai is pretty much a barebones Mark V Bravo, with jury rigged tactical rig on top of that. In the books it was described the Spartans treat the armor more like skin and would bolt on pouches and equipment on top of that, so that's reflected. Her black visor and balaclava is just my take, which is obligatory with the hundreds of other Noble 6 OCs around. I like to think Mai is a deconstruction of sorts of the other Noble Six's that skew more toward cold badassery, viewed to see how actually inhumane they are to themselves. She is a Spartan incarnate, and all that means.

unyieldinghierophant said: **"****So just wanted to say that so far i have really enjoyed the story so far and look forward to what comes next. Only minor issues i have is how you portrayed the alternative halo ce events and how many troops would be transported by the cso super carrier. But other wise keep up the amazing work."**

Admittedly I know that how the Halo universe is heading would be very controversial, but, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and its effects are long-lasting and I refuse to simply ignore it. As for the CSO capacity, that, admittedly, was on a lack of information and the need to not worry about Covenant scarcity. Thanks for reading though!

ksgrip said: **"****I adore this fic. The subtleties of Mai asking of JD to not share the sign la guage because it's theirs. I guess that that is just as much of a confession as you can get out of her. So sickeningly sweet.**

**I would recommend you to skip those missions that are secondary. Doing all the loyalty missions may be far too much work. At the end of the day everyone wants to see the story develop and not so much as having every nook and cranny written."**

There is a certain amount of domestic cuteness that is inserted into those moments, because admittedly JD is very gentle with her, but there is I hope, more of a sense of innocence and lack of social cues there then the implication of affection. It's possessive what Mai was asking, and **rythik78 **actually makes a point about it: It's very indicative of the Spartans. I've yet to explore JD's usage of Spartan Signs yet, but I'll get around to it.

As for hitting side missions, or missions in general, I'll be using the missions in Mass Effect as background to points I want to hit, unless it's major, like Virmire or series defining points like Rannoch in ME3. I'll be careful about it.

Leonard Church814 said: **"****I'm finding Kaal Roth to be one of my favorite sub-plots. Something about following a Kig-yar is just so interesting."**

Okay I'm not beating bushes this time around but I'm using Kaal as a vehicle to set something up. So do keep an eye on him this chapter, next chapter, and then he next pops up.

reality deviant said: **"****Interesting chapter. The Citadel Council is NOT prepared to face rivals on the level of Covenant, even i its just that small group- Sangheili and battle trained, and the Sanshuu-whatstheirnames are natural politicians and schemers to a level above what Asari are used to deal with, from aliens. not made better by the complacency the citadel fell into."**

That is the biggest point of this all: The Covenant exists separately from the Council, and has done so for centuries. The Citadel has never had a rival, and for the Covenant to present themselves as the alternative, it'll be interesting. I mean the Quarians have chosen them already.

* * *

**1-12**

**Dreams are for Other People**

* * *

To describe what it felt like to drop in a pod was the same to describe what it was like to be in a head-on car accident. The jarring difference is that a pod drop had left no time for recovery. The way how his body so naturally wanted to crumple into itself when the pod had hit dirt, it made him want to vomit:

Though then the blast caps on his lid went off, and he was freed, released into the wilds of a battlefield as he ripped the M7S out from its rack in the pod and immediately ducked his head down.

What was the mission briefing again?

His body moved on its own as he realized he was on a beach: and he had to make the beachhead as he slammed into another pod, several other ODSTs taking cover behind it as plasma bolts flew overhead and the roar of Wraiths resounded.

His weapon hung by its sling as he held his own head, slamming into cover as he felt the hands of other men drag him into cover properly, all of them stacked on one another.

"Who the fuck dragged us in we missed the bunkers by a fucking mile!" Corporal Taylors had been one of his new squaddies. He was the new guy, having given JD the blessing of not being the greenhorn on the ODST division on the ship. Distantly, they could hear the MAC guns going off in distant space, the resounding drums of explosions in atmosphere

His answer came from glass and plasma, a Wraith's cannon shot having landed close enough to rock them all out of cover and rain sand on them.

JD had silently sworn beneath his helmet as he ended up on his stomach, getting his SMG out and looking at the impossible one hundred feet or so that separated them from the Covenant bunker positions.

He might've already had a concussion from the pod drop, so anything more was negatable as he saw the distinctive purple trace lines of the Covenant structures, defending, further inward, a Covenant relay station that they needed to hit. The floating Covenant turret positions were impressive sure, but even his SMG could make a dent from its floatation as he unloaded onto one he could see, practically digging his SMG into the sand as he dumped the mag into it. The Grunts on it had wavered as the platform shook.

"Durante! Durante!" Sergeant Valery, the spit heard on her lips as she yelled at him. "Get back into cover you're a sitting duck!"

Plasma bolts had made that abundantly clear as they landed by him.

All around him the beachhead had been covered with ODSTs like him: whoever had been leading them in having botched the drop and made this insertion a beach landing. The blue skies above were dotted with contrails between the UNSC Air Force and Covenant bogies duking it out. A battle for that planet underway.

"Use our pods as cover!" Corporal Seyton had yelled out as he saw the amount of other ODSTs left out in the sandy open, the Covenant laying waste to them. The grace of Covenant weapons betrayed what they did to Humans: It killed them. And yet, for the most part save the Needler based weaponry, they did not make them bleed when they were hit. Cooked, from the inside out with a lethal blow, that was what happened to many as they joined the glassed sand, their bodies at unkind angles as they fell.

JD would've stayed there, unloading into the Covenant towers, but he felt the hands of an ODST grab his kit: seizing him up to move.

It was Sergeant Valery, having left her cover to grab him to safety behind the pod again. Each time a Wraith's cannon had hit, it made a crater.

"Should we-?!" Corporal Taylors had almost dashed for one, seemingly far better as cover than the man sized pods.

Again Valery had grabbed at one of her ODSTs as JD took a knee again, reloading his SMG. "No! You go in there and-!"

Several other ODSTs had demonstrated in their panic to find a hole to hide in, diving in, only to be met with the searing burn of superheated glass melting through their armor as their screams rose the explosions.

Sniper fire rang out from their side: A pod had been tilted over, providing a mount for the team's marksman. "Cavendish!" Valery yelled out for her man. Too concentrated on otherwise aiming at the gun emplacements up the beach that were all cutting them down.

"I need ammo!" He yelled back, his SR-99 piercing through air and flesh as the cry of Grunts manning positions broke through to some relief.

"Durante!" Valery had yelled down at the ODST, about to order him to do so.

"Fuck that, I'll do it, Sarge!" Taylors had looked down at JD, the winds still knocked out of him. If they told him to run he would've been as good as dead. And yet Taylor had gone himself, seeing the supplies from the ammo pods having hit ground and strewn themselves across the beach messily. The man had left his Battle Rifle as he ran out into the open sand, giving other ODSTs time to get their own guns up and return fire. JD had never seen a man like Taylors run like that, with such abandon for the sake of ammo, but he had in the run slung his pack to his front and started through sniper rifle mags into it even as plasma bolts danced around him.

Another Wraith shot had impacted next to them, sending superheated glass raining down as JD felt the pricks on his uncovered trigger fingers. The very concussive impacts of the Wraiths had knocked more than wind from his throat as he stumbled out of cover again.

"Fuck this! I'm moving up."

"Seyton I swear to God-!" Corporal Seyton had pushed forward out of cover, wanting to die closer to the enemy apparently as his movement gave reprieve to Taylors, the shots that missed landing way too close to the pod they had been taking cover behind.

The ODST had disappeared behind a hail of fire that made Valery and JD duck back behind, unable to return any fire as they dropped their mags, giving time for them to look at Taylors finally make his way toward Cavendish a football field away.

JD's suppressor had run out, smoking hot red as the tell-tale sign of more superheated ammo came at them.

"Brutes are out!" Valery had advised, looking at the spikes of ammo come at them. Spike rifles. "Taylors move it!"

JD should've popped out to provide even more covering fire, but none could be had as Taylors looked back as Valery said his name, a spike the size of his head piercing right through his ankle.

"Shit-!"

JD had jerked as if to move and try and get him, but he felt a hand tug him back on his collar. "Don't-!"

Taylors scream on the radio as he tumbled to the sand had been guttural, panting as he swore and grinded against the grit. ODSTs throughout the beach had looked to him, hopeless to do anything as the Covenant saw a sitting duck.

"You just stay there mate I'll make it to you!" Cavendish had yelled at Taylors, having almost made it to him.

Taylors didn't respond as he crawled, his hit foot askew from his body as he left a red line in the sand.

JD had finally popped out of cover to aim at the distant silhouettes of gunners that could hit him far better than he could hit them, trying to do anything to draw their attention away from Taylors. Nothing could be done however.

With one last roar, Taylor had thrown his pack of ammo at Cavendish. The pack was still in midair, cleanly, when a Carbine bolt had went through his head as his entire body jerked before laying itself on the ground. He was dead, his stump of a leg still pumping out blood as JD looked on.

He played guitar, on the ship. Self-taught by sound alone. He didn't have time, as he liked to boast in the mess, to learn how to read music.

One might've mistaken Cavendish as using his sniper as an autorifle, in the rage he used it afterward, silencing fire coming at them from up the beach. That much fire from a single man and that effective? Valery had seen it, time and time before. On the ground, Covenant ground technique wasn't that different in theory as she looked over the crest of the beach and saw the balls of fire from the damned Wraiths converge toward one target.

"Cavendish! They've got you zeroed! Move!"

He did, dropping his rifle entirely as he darted from the pod. Taylor's body had been right there though, and they had been squadmates. He couldn't just leave them there. Cavendish didn't' see the bolt go through the man's head, sliding over to his body despite himself and holding him up as if to ask if he was alive.

"Get out of there!"

Valery's words had come too late as the Wraith fire landed, engulfing the sniper and Taylor's body as ODSTs who had watched at all flinched.

Cavendish told JD once, being a sniper was an act of cowardice on his part. The further enough away from the fight, maybe he'd end up living longer.

She was watching her squad get picked off. It hadn't been the first time, but each time, it didn't get any easier as she grinded her teeth. A metal impact hit right next to JD as he broke off holding his angle, glancing at what it was: His sergeant working through her anger in a punch to the pod, her rage as she saw her men die before clicking her radio.

"All Bravo Company elements! Move up the beach! We need to clear the way for the engineers to knock out those relays!" All around them her squad had linked up with her, waiting on her go. When enough men were finally assembled, she had pat JD's shoulder for him to follow. Dozens of ODSTs had ran as fire picked up again, some without weapons: lost in the drop.

Plasma bolts had landed far too close for anyone's comfort, impacting men and women around him. His gut reaction had been to turn, to reach out and drag them, even if screaming, the rest of the way to the natural cover of the hills over the beach. He didn't though: to do so would be to die himself.

What had happened to Seyton was revealed as they passed his body: He had gotten far enough up the beach before a line of plasma destroyed his torso, his body smoking. With any luck they had avoided his fate as they slammed into the rocks at the bottom of the hill, all of them either crouching or laying on their stomach in the cover that the hill's crest provided for a brief moment. Any second a Covenant could peek above and lay into them.

Seyton was drafted, JD remembered. Unhappily, almost every day. He wanted to leave, so he had found his exit in death.

All of their motion trackers going red as hostiles were close.

Valery hugged her Battle Rifle close as she pointed out the sphere like Covenant bunkers.

"Durante." She addressed him and several of her men. "Take three of us to clear these bunkers, the rest of us will push ahead and give you space. You do this quick as you can, you read?"

His only response was a nod.

He had pointed at three men and women and Valery had taken the rest, going over the top and meeting a wall of Covenant fire.

McCauly, Odell, Pratt.

"Grenades!" Valery had yelled up and down the line of ODSTs at the bottom of the hill, most of them, priming their explosives as the intention was clear: over the hill. Valery had stood up as she had one in her hand, the other making a fist, pushing at the hill. Men and women had cocked their arms back as Valery counted down with her hands. When she hit zero, the pineapple like grenades flew by a volley, an explosion rivaling even a Wraith's going off over their heads as pieces of Grunts and Jackals flew above them. "Push!"

McCauly, Odell, and Pratt had rolled over to JD as the rest of the ODSTs scattered up the hill, disappearing above as the collective roar of gunfire and plasma coalesced into warfare.

"Let's go JD!" McCauly had been a younger ODST, younger than JD even. He'd never seen his face but no one would as his helmet was blown forward in glass and steel, bits and pieces of matter, organic and otherwise plastering JD as the three remaining ODSTs snapped to the plasma trail left by a Beam Rifle: A Jackal had peered out of the window of one of the overlooking bunkers, it ducking back down as three different ODSTs laid into it before McCauly's body collapsed onto the ground still.

JD had pointed at Odell and Pratt, only after Pratt had aimed his MA5's grenade launcher at the slit of the purple bunker's firing port, putting one off and seeing the inside explode. Pointing again at that bunker, orders had been clear: _You two, go finish it._

JD had been left with one directly forward of them, and he had rushed up as fast as he could.

Cresting over the hill he had seen the coopted coastal fortifications that the Covenant had stolen when they first came to the planet, dead bodies in it both human and Covenant. The backs of his other ODSTs blitzing forward hoping to catch the Covenant off-guard. He had barely caught Valery with three other of her men climb onto an unprepared Wraith and unload into its pilot hatch, his attention otherwise grabbed by an Elite popping out of the bunker behind them.

It raised its Plasma Rifle, not noticing JD until the burn of an entire magazine of SMG fire hit its side. It tried to duck back into the bunker before its shields broke, but to no avail, its left arm eviscerated as it fell.

JD dropped into the trench leading into the bunker, his own grenade ready as he flicked away the pin with one hand, tossing it into the door at an angle as he heard it bounce off the back of the fallen Elite. The splatter that followed was unkind to hear, and yet the sweetest sound JD heard all day as he aimed his gun up and sweeped in front of the door, slicing the pie as he saw wounded Grunts and Jackals bleeding from shrapnel and broken limbs. The Elite had its head blown off completely as JD primed another nade, but the roar of a beast had cut off.

He had never been that close to a Brute on Persei, he thanked his stars, but now and there, one had been chest to chest with him as its grey hair smoked and was bloody of three different types of fluid. Its jaw was opened impossibly wide as JD found it close enough see the spit hit his visor, every instinct telling him to drop the primed grenade and put both hands on his gun.

He did, leaving them both with a situation as JD rushed forward and put the burning muzzle of his SMG to the Brute's chest. Two times his height, five times his weight, and yet still, somehow, he was able to push back the Brute as he drilled a hole through its midsection in gunfire, the smell of burning flesh and fur apparent as the Brute stumbled back with JD's assault.

The pop of the grenade going off had put shrapnel into JD's bag and leg armor as the explosion threw the two into the bunker, the Brute on its back with an ODST laying on them:

The SMG had been thrown asides as desperately JD tried to regain focus. The Brute found it first as in one swipe he had been thrown off and to the side, his back slamming into the bunker walls only to collapse on top of a Jackal.

Each step of the Brute approaching him had him flail on the ground until he found a way to push himself up to his two feet, again chest to chest with the Brute as he saw only two blades attached to its weapons swing down at him. He jerked his head just in time: offering his shoulder instead as the armored pauldron wedged the Spiker's bayonets in it, he again collapsing to the floor. This time his hand had found his pistol's holster before the beast had opted to raise its leg up to crush his head:

There was nothing more to it than JD awkwardly angling his pistol up, into the genitalia of the Brute, the pain throwing it off balance as more of its blood exploded onto him. He didn't aim, he only pulled the trigger until nothing more came out of his SOCOM, the sound of a body hitting the floor shaking even his bones, his eyes closed as everything went still, laying on his side with a Spiker in his armor's shoulder.

If he opened his eyes he thought, he might've seen himself dead.

He stayed like that for a long time, frozen as if a corpse himself, afraid to open his eyes until he vaguely heard a voice over his comms.

"Durante where the fuck are you?!"

JD had been panting inside of his helmet as the body of the Brute stopped twitching, bleeding onto his armor.

"DURANTE!"

He had shoved whatever weight was on him as his back found the wall, his limbs shaking as the Brute weapon was thrown to the floor and, in the same stroke, his helmet taken off of himself. Teeth chattering, heart beating, hands unceasing as the war took him over in one sine wave in his ears that was unceasing. He didn't know when he collapsed, back against the wall, bringing his hands to his face, but he could not live otherwise. Not as death stared at him in the face and, just that day, it blinked first.

**This was his first drop**. All those years ago. Right after Persei. His very arrival into the ODSTs had been with some mystique: He had been one of the few to ever survive a Glassing as a Marine, and for that, it meant something. And yet here, now, on what had been his second deployment, fresh off of burying his mother and relegating his life to making sure Humanity had at least one more day…

The Brute had made him realize what that all meant: Even if he survived, he would spend the rest of his life on the battlefield.

And he did.

Dust and grit touched his face as his hands rubbed into his eyes. He wanted to tear his own teeth out as he tried his best to remove himself from that battle, to find a happy place in the middle of a bunker with the dead by his hand strewn about, blood still dripping from the ceiling.

Fear. He was afraid for his life, in every aspect as he finally controlled his breathing before he passed himself out. Realizing that he had been called for, realizing what that meant:

His helmet had been slid on as he basically ran, and ran, toward the battle that he had wanted to be gone from, toward his squad. And yet…

Going on drops had become a blur to him, that many years into it and without a proper promotion in his rank. It was an oddity, truly, but to him he didn't much mind remaining a private. Less responsibilities, less liability to have men die because of him. He was not careless, or a man unable to lead. Though what had been done to him for years, it all began, if not at Persei, then here, on that particular drop.

A memory, a dream, JD had become two as he remembered what he found as the battle faded away and found only a grassy field of dead. Covenant, ODSTs alike. His nightmares were not the worst-case scenario, the horror of some fear within him that could be articulated only in the surreal. His nightmares were of his mistakes, lived again and again without change.

He could've done nothing for this squad now as he had years ago.

Valery and her men had died, overwhelmed by a suicidal Covenant. When JD and reinforcements from the beach came, they didn't find much left, and JD had become one of the few survivors of the alpha drop. The relay was destroyed in the end, at the cost of eighty men and women, but the planet was lost eventually, after a month of fighting.

That field before him, as he felt the guilt took him again, moved on and on into a foggy flatness, dead and dead and dead before him that he alone was a survivor of. Marines, civilians, everything in between. Bodies and bodies on the floor, some whole, some not. Some young, some old. Men and women, dead from a life that no one deserved, killed by an evil from the stars.

Walking before graves, JD found himself in endless rows he had walked amongst until he found a reflection: Another ODST like him, looking down at what had been done. He walked up to them, tried to speak, to ask them the why of everything, but no sound came out of JD's mouth as he clawed at his helmet. No matter what he did it would not come off.

"You were too late." The nameless ODST spoke, motioning back to the graves, the graves and graves that went onto into the infinite. Each plot had been unceremonious, marked only by a rifle, stuck in the dirt, going on into eternity.

Each one a name he knew. A person that had lived. Someone that should've been in his place.

A grave appeared before JD that made him stop trying to tear his helmet off, like a ghost, floated over and forcing him to bear witness, as he had all his life, to the memory of who this was. A helmet had been on the butt of the rifle, sticking up, a crack in its black sheen. And yet, a reflection:

He knew whose helmet this was as an image animated on its cracked surface. Impossible, and yet, he snapped around. He was no longer before the dead, but before the about to be killed: a dusty planet it seemed. He looked to the mountains in the distance, split in two. No. What? He'd seen these skies before, that mountain top. This was Reach. In the distance: Covenant ships glassing.

Wherever he was now, he was back at Reach. In the distance he saw the skeletons of shipyards. What was this place called again? He had been deployed nearby early on to secure an FOB for UNSC air power to rearm and refit. He remembered as the scene fully manifested, broken and dilapidated buildings around them speaking to an industrial focus on ships: He was near the Aszod ship breaking yards. Maybe this was what he imagined would've happened if Operation Uppercut failed: the Fall of Reach.

Much closer had been the sound of fighting. His hand immediately went to his pistol holster, but found nothing there as he found himself lightheaded, light bodied, as if he had just stood up too fast and permanently stuck in that daze. Covenant plasma fire had been nearby as he gravitated toward it. A lot of it, answered back by only-

One individual. One individual as he looked around and saw Phantoms: an entire Covenant division.

He tried to focus as he saw an Elite get shotgunned against a wall after being pinned. He recognized that figure that did the deed. He knew her very well.

Spartans never die, he was told once. They're missing in action.

A group of Brutes had appeared behind him, passing by him without regard as they all roared at the Spartan. It had been Mai, she throwing the shotgun to the ground as she grabbed the SPNKr rocket launcher on her back, aiming it at the group as she let a rocket fly. A Brute Chieftain had been leading the back, its gravity hammer slamming down as the rocket almost made contact, sending it off and away into the sky as Mai aimed it again at their feet, charging, finding the half-way.

The explosion went off before the Brute Chieftain could reswing, outright killing the lesser, but leaving him standing as explosive shrapnel blinded it. It never saw Mai charge it, a yell in her throat as one of her knives found its midsection, tearing across and gutting it.

How long had she been fighting like this? JD had looked around and saw piles and piles of bodies, killed in everyway he could think, done with extreme prejudice. Pieces and pieces of bodies whole left on the dusty ground.

Before the Chieftain had died however, it went to its belt, finding the stick grenades preferred by its kind. It didn't prime it, but it did swing, hitting her square in the helmet.

JD had flinched, the sound of glass shattering apparent even above her shield running out, she turning away in pain only into more plasma fire. Off it came as she ran at a dropped assault rifle, a silver Elite charging at her as she held it at her hip and unloaded into the monster. The bullets had broken into its body as plasma bolts, unstopped, hit her own armor, burning pieces of it off in molten pieces as those that hit the suit beneath it did just that: burn.

She didn't care though, not as the Elite hit the floor. She saw the shadow of another Elite behind her, its sword gleaming as she instinctively threw her shoulder to break its neck.

JD, so much, had wanted to yell, to help, to do something, and yet he was frozen as Mai broke the Elite's shields and sent it to the ground. Her pistol had appeared out of its holster, only to unceremoniously put a bullet between the eyes of that Elite.

Her entire body jerked as another plasma bolt hit her hip, causing her to cradle her rifle in the direction of more and more encroaching Elites. Shields breaking, flesh being hit, bodies dropping to dirty ground had been meager trades as her armor, her very body, was being eaten away at by pain and plasma. She had stopped moving from her place. This was her last stand. If she willed her feet to move, then what?

An Elite had come at her, chest to chest, her guns clicking empty as she dropped them, trying to go for her knives, but the Elite's arm had swiped across her face sending her to the floor.

A puddle of blood had pooled where she stood, her armor seemingly leaking her humanity.

The Elite had popped an energy dagger, pouncing on her.

He wanted to scream, to even bite his own tongue off, but he could do nothing as Mai tried to stave off her final moments: her legs had come up to the Elite's midsection pushing it away for a fleeting second. Another had appeared at her side, kicking her over, only to receive a punch for its efforts.

There it was: Something JD had never heard before. He had no idea how this sound came into his head. Though there it had been in all of its desperation, its pity and realization that death came for even her. She was crying, panting, in fear and fighting them not as a Spartan, but someone trying desperately to survive horror as her body did its best to fight for her, twisting as the kicked Elite came back, only to stab the ground as she contorted her body to avoid.

There was no stopping the punched Elite from activating the dagger in his gauntlet however as Mai fended off the other, only to open her stomach to him, and, in one thrust, stab her midsection. A burst of blood erupted through the surface of her balaclava on her mouth, and, in one last moment, she locked eyes with the ODST that could not help her. That fear in her eyes, of emotion written on her face, it was a vision seen in nightmares, foreboding reality.

* * *

A crack echoed through the well deck of the Normandy that had been followed a gasp, emanating from, usually, behind the Mako. The Mako hadn't been there, bearing a man who had just woken up as men of action always do: By instinct as his legs snapped and kicked up as if jumping from a pod, his right arm slamming into the wall on his right as if grasping for a weapon.

JD's nightmares were not of the impossible: they were of his life.

For everything they had to hide from Shepard, there had been this: They had been veterans of a war. Not a battle, or a campaign, but a war for their very survival.

"JD." How soft his named sounded when said from her lips, compared to every other word that was uttered from her. Yet it was the loudest sound he had heard as those remaining in the bay had turned to the sitting shock trooper against the wall and saw him dazed and confused by his own reckoning.

As his vision darted around, it finally settled in a sight he wanted to make sure was true:

He had never seen Mai raise an eyebrow, but today, she had at him:

As did half the dozen or so Seamen and Marines in the bay.

He had raised his hands defensively, coughing, urging some of them along as he wiped his face down of sweat that wasn't there. His right hand remained balled, not recognizing an M7S had not been in it as he forced it open.

A shadow came over him: It was Mai. Thank God.

"Condition green?" She spoke to him in the only way she knew how confidently. He didn't answer, staring up at her, her unarmored state betraying them both as he struggled to remember the one thing he had set as a rule to remember about her: She was human. Without an answer, she kneeled down, and he had sucked in his breath.

"A dream." He finally answered, now eye to eye. They knew of each other's nightmares, of their dreams, of the war that would always remain in their head. Sleeping in shifts during their time in New Buffalo had made them aware of each other's tics while sleeping, but for JD, his reactions had never been that bad. It was almost mutant like, but for Mai, she was relatively still: her jaw would grind, her eyes beneath her lids constantly moving like snaps. Though it had been her veins: Even in her sleep her body responded to combat stimuli like he had never seen.

JD had signed a particular sign to her, when they came back from Therum and she struggled within herself to take off her armor: He had pointed at her, then the same hand had gave her a thumbs up as it rotated a bit. He had his helmet off, so she read his lips as he mouthed the words.

She replicated now.

ARE YOU OKAY?

He looked at her hands, but then her face, locking eyes with her as he calmed down from a high he hadn't even known he came down from. He decided he was, here and then, nodding to her and standing up himself and, for a moment, being able to see the top of Mai's head before she reclaimed her height advantage.

"Did you die?" She looked away as she asked, drawing away the last of the stares as she found them. JD had gone cold again for a moment, shaking his head. Only then, looking at Mai's real face, did he realize that she looked most human when dying.

An odd question, but not for who they were. "Not me." He answered, not going any further as he was immediately aware of the Mako not being there. "Where'd…?"

"Shepard took Hitman and Wrex on a mission."

And he had slept through the Mako, of all things, being deployed? He had been half impressed with himself.

Oddly enough, it was only in his dreams that his old life still remained. In his waking moments he had remembered where he was: Tali had been panting again in her suit as Garrus matched crunches with her rather painlessly. Even he had armored down, revealing more of his natural form, into his race's equivalent of sweats.

Unapologetically the Spartan and ODST both stared. To see aliens without their armor, it had been, for them, when they were dead. The leathery bodies of Elites, the squat, short forms of the Grunts, and everything in between had nullified them to the odd shape of Garrus's body. Angular, scaled, bony almost, reaching out into the territory of raptors and avians.

Did Turians sweat? JD had wondered. Quarians did as Tali's visor, despite its robust cooling, had been misty and giving way to actual droplets.

She had really been taking their advice to heart: any cloth on her suit had been folded and stowed leaving her with only the synthetic body form. Perhaps killing Geth had put a pep in her step, whenever she had down time from her new duties in engineering.

What they had her doing in the bay, it hadn't been much to the trained soldier that Garrus had once been, but he had done it with her regardless.

Consciously, JD felt lazy having slept instead. Though it was how he had been for as long as he remembered.

Earlier that day he had spent it going over the alphabet with Mai, silently of course. Repetition made perfect, and for all the perfection that she had as a Spartan and her craft, it was an oddity that there was something that JD had done better than her.

Cross-legged: that's how she sat he noticed, as they went through bursts of five letters at a time. L-M-N-O-P was always fun. He chuckled however to himself, barely, but Mai had caught it as she held N in her hand. The way she often asked questions of him had been with a tilt of her head left. Usually there was context enough for him to elaborate on a sign she didn't understand, but here, it was different. "Did I do something wrong?"

She didn't wear shoes, technically, out of her armor. Her techsuit had some armored padding itself, not unlike Garrus's plates on his thighs and shoulders, so she had tucked herself in comfortably like a-

"Criss-cross Applesauce." Mrs. Lionel would often advise kindergarteners at the start of each day on the sit-down rug to sit like that in her sing-song voice. JD had repeated it now, two decades, and yet two lifetimes later. Mai's head had only dipped deeper, her eyebrows furrowing. "It's how you're sitting right now."

To hear her repeat those words on her own soft-spoken hush, he found reflectiveness as she remembered something.

"I went to school, for… Three years." She tried to remember a long time ago for her. The upbringings of a girl she had, somehow, once been. "There was a charity organization which taught children like me for a while."

JD spoke of his childhood to her in quiet moments, describing some signs, how he attached some memories to them and why he had learned them in the first place. For some, it had been out of curiosity. For others, it was accompanying his mother to the park, and pointing out objects or reading picture books with her as a child.

"Is attaching such… feelings useful to remembering some things?" Mai had asked, outright. It had sounded so obvious to her, and yet, in her entire library of knowledge that encompassed almost all of the UNSC's collective military technical and tactical knowledge, she required no such niceties to recall them. Pain perhaps, hurt from Chief Mendez in training, but nothing she could call emotion of such personal measure. If she had, they were buried, long ago, by the necessity of her creation.

He nodded, going back, thinking of what she said prior. A hint, like the wheel of Dharam she wore as a necklace, beneath her techsuit. She had been something before a Spartan: She had been a vagrant living in the underside of New Jerusalem's colony. He remembered that colony. No planet was named after Earth's holiest city without due process. Proclaimed by Jewish settlers first, the very fact that they had called it that spurred Muslim and Christian colonists to flood it before they could use a planet, beautiful as it was, for themselves only. Violence followed: a dangerous class system arising that had swallowed people like Mai whole.

How lucky he was: A father, a mother, a place to sleep, food to eat, and a childhood to live in.

Perhaps if not a Spartan, Mai would've been fighting all of her life anyway with where she had been, before she was kidnapped.

"Did you like school?"

She nodded urgently, once, and it surprised her. Being with kids her age and in the same relative situation? It was a reprieve. It was-

"I wasn't lonely." When she said it her teeth snapped as if to take it back.

She would get like that, sometimes, when JD spoke of his past. The realization that she had really been in a bad place, only to be taken to someplace, arguably, worse. He had done well to move them along as any pretense of them still learning sign language dropped.

"When I was growing up, in elementary, all the boys tried their best to be the funniest. Because when they made girls laugh they thought that it was cute."

"Laughing or girls?"

"Yeah." JD did have some dry humor within him, still surviving, perhaps only kept to deal with his more outward ODST squadmates (and there had been a lot). Mai hadn't gotten the verbal joke however. "I mean. Girls, girls are cute when they laugh."

"Only?"

"It's a broad statement, Mai."

"Are you funny?"

JD paused as he reached for a canteen to take a sip, thinking about it. If this was how Mai was trying to find out more about him, it wasn't organically, but it was… something.

"I mean, uh, I could try to say something funny."

"…Sure?"

Of all the things JD had been, a funnyman hadn't been one of them as he reached back into his head for the memory of ODSTs who had been funny:

Donatello Marx. Sergeant. ODST Squad Lead. He had rubberbanded a Joker card to his shoulder piece.

"Do you want to hear a joke?"

Hadn't he just asked that? "Okay."

"The Army." She was still waiting for the joke as a shadow of a smile was both in JD's eyes and mouth, fading away once it was clear the shot he had taken had missed by the scale of miles: over her head. He had moved his hands up, palms up, slightly rotating them as he tried his best to get the gears rolling in her head. "That's- that's the joke."

"What?"

"The Army. The Army's a-" He tried to remember the briefing to Operation Uppercut, Noble Team had been a detachment from the UNSC Army, right? His words wavered off as he sucked in his lips. "You know what, never mind."

"How was that a joke?"

"Because-" JD saw a barrier he in a million years thought he wouldn't be able to climb. Had he heard Mai laugh before? What did she find funny? Questions of her personality flew by his mind. What actually did he know about her? What was her favorite taste? Her preference for music? What she saw in her peaceful dreams, both waking and asleep? Her opinion on policy? Who she was? Then, a thought: Did she have them at all?

Apparently, he had thought of it longer than he known, pausing for a second, hung out with sputtering words that were put silent when he heard a-

A push of air out of her nose, one of her hands brought to her lips, a finger hooked in front of it as if holding something back. Her eyes were dead and yet, there was a certain spark to them that followed by her straightening her head.

Seeing him struggle was amusing to her.

Her hand had fallen back to idle soon enough, and he had been liable to miss it all, but yet…

"I'll uh, explain later."

With a nod, they had gotten back to sign language before JD took the time to nap and fall back into the nightmare of his first drop.

* * *

How easy omni-tools were allowed to them. Or, at least, to him. Yielding such tools on his wrist was natural as a Kig-Yar. "Curious. From what I recall your species are very mercantile. Similar to the Volus of our galaxy." If everyone had a price, then words must've been cheap for the Professor Mordin Solus as he mentioned to Kaal Roth.

The Jackal had been feeling over the omni-tool on his left arm, matching rather well with his energy shield. Omni-tools, in general, had been slowly being distributed amongst the Covenant. They were a dime a dozen and a galactic standard. That much the Council races had over the Covenant: for the lowliest Grunt to be given such an information terminal with access to a system as wide as the extranet? Madness.

Perhaps that was why the hierarchy of the Covenant maintained that, after the Prophets, the Elites and Brutes were to receive theirs first. After that then, it would trickle down. Kaal Roth couldn't wait however, after reading a message, and an offer, left to him.

"Thank you again for answering questions on your race. Not many open to communication due to Covenant structure." Mordin went on again as he slid his rolling chair over in the prefab research tent, Kaal sliding off the table which the good doctor had spent much time sticking needles into him on.

Kaal motioned the omni-tool up. "It was a pleasure doing business."

That would've been that then, that night as Kaal had rushed back from the bar, neglecting to tell the good doctor he had a few drinks in him. If Mordin had decided that his race naturally produced alcohol in its blood, then so be it, there would be others no doubt, and he could hide his drink when there was opportunity afoot.

He went to leave, but the door to the exit had opened first: revealing a Turian, large and imposing to Kaal. He'd dealt with his fair share of Elites who sought harsh treatment on him. It was funny though, he had usually survived longer than them. This Turian had seemed to radiate that energy of the Sangheili. Though for a Turian to do that, it meant that they were special, to a degree:

"God dammit Solus, why do I have to find out through the Council you're STG-" The Turian had come in yelling, unable to catch the Jackal that was shorter than him as he almost tripped. Stopping before Kaal he had mentally righted himself. "Oh sorry. I didn't mean to."

"Don't worry about it." Kaal had shuffled away and out. Later with his new omni tool, taking steps to learn it and eventually use it, he had done a cursory search on galactic events: on Saren and the Geth especially. Though, of all things he didn't expect to read, the Turian that almost stepped on him leaving Mordin Solus's office was none other than Saren Arterius's protégé: Avitus Rix.

Mordin had been shocked to see Avitus at all at that late hour, his happy tone kept though as he went back to the data he had compiled from Kaal. "Avitus, what seems to be the issue?"

The two had known each other via sparse meetings and alerts passed down and up: Mordin had been much too comfortable, if not prodding of the new species that, on three ends: Council, Covenant, and Alliance had asked the reigning official on hand to do something about it. That official had been a Spectre deployed to Altis to keep a pulse on the situation. A Spectre whose mentor had been the most wanted individual in the galaxy bar two others: an information broker and a rather elusive man. A Spectre who, just very recently, he had poured his heart out in defense of until Saren's own words damned him. Avitus had been shamed publicly and the Council saw it wise to keep him lowkey on Altis.

The planet had been, evidently, too big. It was big enough for the Covenant and the Alliance supposedly, but not big enough for a scientist Salarian and a Spectre.

"What're you doing here, Doctor Solus?" Avitus locked the door behind him he thought, only for Solus to sigh and just wave his omni-tool to re-open it.

"Would hope you understand my goals here, purely, scientific." He looked up at Avitus, standing, arms crossed. "If you know I am STG, then you would know just recently retired." He smiled at the end of it, hoping it was enough.

Avitus knew better. Technically he knew worse as he glowered at him.

"You worked on a new Genophage, Doctor."

Surprise had written on Mordin's face. "How did you-"

"Saren was my mentor, Doctor." Avitus ground in his voice. It was a weight, a sin, and a blessing. "He told me a lot of what STG has done to the galaxy, when the Spectres weren't supposed to be watching."

Mordin had glared at the Spectre. "Not new, the same, just modification within parameters."

"Renewed then." He made a point of. "And I don't care about that. We make calls in our line of work and follow our orders. What I do care about is that a man of your magnitude is present here."

"Am retired, Avitus." Mordin said again. "If not, would not be running a simple research clinic next door to your operations base." Avitus sneered, he never trusted a Salarian who had made it Mordin's age. Let alone one that had been a part of STG: the Salarian Special Task Group, the model for the Spectres. "If not here to judge, then..." Mordin's face was then that of intrigue. "What do you want, Avitus?"

Even people as perceptive as him were to be surprised from time to time as Avitus sighed. "To keep me informed."

"You or the Council?"

The Humans, the Covenant, they were hiding something. But what exactly, and why, they did not know. He had seen the Brutes and Elites threaten death amongst their Grunts for their silence. Technology? That wasn't the case, the Covenant via Destiny had been more than willing to elaborate on Slipspace and their own forms of space age tech. Perhaps, granted, there were more secrets technologically, but they were entitled to them for now. It was a game that was being played between the Covenant and the Alliance mutually it felt like to Avitus, but for what ends he just could not place.

He was told by the Council to find out what.

"Does it matter, Doctor Solus?"

Two men, history changed before them, stood in that clinic, on the verge of their greater journeys.

* * *

Captain Shaw had ran over the recent reports: Same as always from Altis, the stationary fleet he had now commanded still doing its rounds around the system and the planet with a token command picket from the 5th Fleet and Hackett. Fifth Fleet had been very much nearby given the change in diplomatic relations. The command staff of the ships that had been present over Altis when the debris field from the Solace appeared had been unique among the Alliance: they were in on the secret that only the Admiralty knew. The fact that the Covenant had been a genocidal civilization hellbent on the end of their humanity had tensed all and given weight of existential nature to them. It kept him up more at night, thinking of what would it would've been like for him to be a UNSC captain instead of an Alliance.

Thankfully the token Council taskforce had kept themselves busy with menial Council diplomatic tasks such as cataloging the Covenant species and their subtypes, however things had changed the second a Quarian envoy ship had arrived in system and offered the Covenant nothing less than the galaxy. The Alliance Admiralty had begrudgingly allowed it on the pragmatic fact that the more Covenant responsibility fell upon the Quarians, the less they had to deal with.

What they hadn't anticipated was what the Quarians would do come the bombshell revelation that Rannoch had been the Elite's Sanghelios.

Probes and scout ships had been sent to investigate the locations of the other Covenant homeworlds and important centers, none had arrived yet to much of their anticipation. Covertly however, several scouts routed through shell corporations acting on behalf of the Alliance Admiralty had sought out other planets: Those revealed by the Spartan Mai.

Shaw had access to one drone which had arrived at its location: "She called this one **Onyx**."

It had been very far flung, traditional FTL from an already out of the way Relay the only way to get there. Of those planets Mai had listed, she had spoken of this one as the most in her first and only batch of offerings. It wasn't there however. "No dice." His first officer spoke, looking at the same report on the bridge of the Perugia. "You think she's pulling a fast one?"

"She doesn't need to." Shaw had heard of Mai. "I don't think someone like her lies to make her point."

Like a boogeyman, the ghost of human supremacist groups had arisen in Mai's steed. Had her existence been discovered by them, and the war that she had come from, it would justify nothing more than the righteousness of race. The echoes of one such group, Cerberus, had come forth to the now as Shepard stood before the Council:

Shepard had gunned down scientists, civilians, that only upon retrospect were outright discovered to be Cerberus. It was for that tenacity that Cerberus had gone into hiding as far as intelligence services were concerned. The rage of Shepard for what they had done to her and her men was perhaps one of the reasons she was Spectre now.

One had been on planet, and Shaw had been instructed to stay clear, though his doubts about truly having one present as a need had been proven wrong today as the bridge of the Perugia buzzed to live: Inbound from the nearby Mass Relay.

Several Quarian ships identifying themselves as part of the Migrant Fleet, or otherwise occupied by Quarians on their Pilgrimage, had arrived over Altis shortly after the Covenant's arrival. Despite all warnings otherwise, they had stayed, processing the Covenant through themselves as the galaxy, for the first time, heeded the Quarians. Any chance that they were to be shoo'd off gone as Shaw yelled out his orders to battlestations.

Perhaps the Geth had come for Altis.

The shot heard around the Alliance however, hadn't been gunfire. It had been a communication as Shaw's first officer went to her console and saw-

"It's a wideband communication throughout the Extranet in Quarian."

"What does it say?" Shaw asked as he settled into his chair on the bridge.

The translator had flipped through words to describe: Fatwa, Jihad, Crusade, Holy War, Great Journey. Another crewman had shouted out from the CIC: A decision of the Council.

"The Treaty of the State of Quarians and the Provocation of the Geth has been amended." He announced. "In light of recent events arising the hostility of the Geth to Council-affiliated member species, and the need for added pre-emptive defensive solutions, the Quarian fleet known as the Flotilla is hereby directed with reasonable aid to, at their own discretion, begin combat operations in and past the Perseus Veil."

History had been busy recently. The Council had outright okayed a war on the other side of the galaxy. In the face of the Geth, with the rise of Shepard and Saren, the arrival of the Covenant, the galaxy was set down a path.

Suddenly, alarms and alerts from the CIC, all shut off and addressed as in one summary, this:

"We've got inbound."

"Is it-?"

The day had come. The Alliance and its intelligence services had been tracking them for weeks, trying to guess which relay they would use, and if they would do it. The communications from the Citadel between Destiny and the Council, the envoys of the Quarians and the recent uptick in Human/Quarian communications throughout the galaxy. It was inevitable.

The First Officer of the Perugia had nodded, brevity in her voice as they all looked at the display screens of the Mass Effect relay into system, buzzing with activity uncommon in that galaxy.

"IFF matches known reports. The Migrant Fleet is here."

The survivors of the Morning War, of an entire species: the last of the Quarians.

If the Solace, appearing suddenly in orbit, had floored Shaw and his crew, then the arrival of the largest fleet in the galaxy had only matched that as the stars themselves were blocked off ships, older than the Geth themselves.

"Incoming hail." Shaw's first officer rattled off. He nodded at her to let it play. And play it did. From the omni-tool of the Jackal Kaal Roth, to the highest chambers of the galaxy in the Citadel, to the secluded headquarters of an Illusive Man:

_"This is a message to all concerned: On behalf of the Conclave and the Admiralty at command of the Flotilla, we have arrived to build an army. _ _ **Keelah Se'lai."** _

* * *

Prefab storage facilities like these were a dime a dozen in the galaxy. Shepard had forgotten how often she found these types in their exact layout amongst pirates. Perhaps that was why Hitman had so naturally, after lacing the doorways with explosives and breaching, knew exactly where to look and aim their rifles as they stormed Tonn Actus's facility on that glassy planet of Tuntau. Oddly enough it had been on the otherside of the system, shared with Pinnacle Station (and her apartment, no less). How the joint force at Pinnacle hadn't picked them up she wouldn't know, but then again, she knew how pirates operated:

Under the noses of those who would fight them.

Emerson had, before the loud bang of breaching the doors to that building, pointed at his secondary section of Hitman, signaling with his hands for them to back away from the building and secure the perimeter. Kaiden had agreed for once as he patted the Marine sergeant's shoulder.

"Williams. On point." Kaidan had directed down the ramp into the subterranean section of the prefabs, the light of the stars above letting light below down.

Ashley had abided well enough, rifle up as she and the rest of Hitman followed behind her, weapons up and sectors covered as Shepard was on tail.

"Alenko with me, Emerson, maintain security."

"Aye ma'am." Emerson responded, taking a knee by the door as the rest of the ground team had pushed out and formed a perimeter around the facility, the Mako ready and buzzing to take down any of Actus's patrols that might've come back.

Wrex had seemed amused by Shepard as she ordered her men around, his weapon not even drawn as he walked down the same ramp behind the humans, in line with Shepard. "You military types are so meticulous. Any warrior worth a damn should just know what to do without being told."

Shepard had lowered her rifle as she let the point team proceed further without them. "You never served?"

"You think the Krogan have a military?" Wrex gruffed. "We're much more organic than you realize, Shepard."

Williams had held a first up as the lightsource from the night sky behind them faded, she tapping on her helmet's night vision as the rest behind her followed suit.

"Tactics are good." Shepard allowed herself small talk as she thumbed her own night vision, observing her men move forward until they finally reached the main cargo floor entrance. Immediately, her riflemen had taken corners, silently scanning sectors.

"Clear."

"Clear." Affirmatives rang out in hushed silence.

"Commander," It was Kaiden, Shepard putting a little more pep in her step moving down. "You should see this."

Even Wrex seemed worried as he rose an eyebrow behind his airtight helmet. The planet had no breathable atmosphere, to speak of, and even a Krogan needed air.

Shepard had hit the safety on her rifle as she proceeded down, rallying with her men as they all held angles on a blown open door leading into the main cargo compartment of the facility. It was still smoldering. Someone had gotten here first.

"Rivals?" Shepard asked of Wrex as he unhook his shotgun from his belt.

"Dead meat." He answered.

"I see bodies. Armed. There was a fight." One of the riflemen in Hitman had seen into the compartment bay of the prefab, gunshots, puddles of blood, shattered debris from conflict.

Just a cursory glance and even Shepard knew that whatever had happened, it was still happening.

"Come out with your hands up! We are Systems Alliance Marines and you are in violation of-!" Kaiden's diplomatic message, yelled out, was cut short by the sound of a shotgun going off with a very wet splash at the distant end of the prefab.

"Go!" Shepard had made the decision as Ashley stacked against the door frame, the man behind her tapping her shoulder as she signaled to go in. Like a human wave the dozen or so Marines piled in with their weapons up, spreading along the walls and finding cover behind crates and crates of cargo, stolen from ships based on their lack of uniformity.

What was revealed by their breach had been bodies fresh, some still twitching, some still alive, but not for much longer.

Williams had broken formation as she approached a Turian, keeled over, hand at his stomach that he was trying to hold in. The two locked gazes and Williams had seen the pain and suffering. The Turian in his battered armor, a gunshot in his gut, had tried to motion toward the upper levels of the bay, but he had lost balance, only to tumble to the ground as the shock left him to fade from life.

"Commander." Williams looked back to Shepard, the furrow of her brow noted even behind her helmet. Shepard had looked at her as she pointed two fingers toward the back.

"On me, Wrex. Alenko, get me a BDA. Williams on me."

As Kaiden had taken several men and cleared the floor, tending to the dead, Shepard had attended to whoever did this personally. Wrex had already assumed, but he just wanted to see the body as they climbed the stairs to the quarters of the prefab. A bloody trail left behind by someone who probably had the same idea as Wrex. Shepard stepped in front of Williams as they arrived to that door into the office and quarters. If anyone was guns up on this, it was going to be her.

Not that Wrex agreed as the door was kicked open by him as he held the shotgun at his hip, ready to take on any-

The visual stimuli of bursting into a room, seeing a Turian with no head blasted on his own desk, repainting that half of the room, only for the Krogan who breached to get thrown onto his side by a grey flash had been a lot.

Ashley had raised her rifle about ready to kick off a shot at who had thrown Wrex at the ground, but Shepard had kicked her aim off and away as she pushed herself and Ashley out of the room. A guttural sound erupted from Ashley in the form of a question, but Shepard had a feeling that this fight wasn't theirs.

A similar sound belched out of Wrex's mouth as he tried to bring his shotgun up, but it was kicked away as a boot fit for a Krogan stamped down on his arm.

Looking up at the blinding light of the still active office, Wrex knew it very much was a Krogan as it spoke down to him.

"Just doing you a favor, Wrex." All Krogan through their translators had deep, grungy voices, befit their statue and size. Even then Shepard could pick up hints that this one was even older than Wrex. Let alone the grey wilted skin, armor barely having any of its yellow paint on its dents, instead decorated by teeth from (her blood turned cold) Thresher Maws. Wrex still struggled despite recognizing the voice: a Krogan on its back not a kind thing to see as Shepard and Ashley warily entered the room. "See, the Humans have the right idea."

"Identify yourself." Shepard had asked, just short of gun point as the Krogan stepped off of Wrex. Their green, almost mossy like eyes had been that of a lizards: a black slit down the center as he looked at the two humans. He didn't answer as Wrex again tried to get up, his hands flaring as Shepard felt the biotics kick in.

There was shotgun in the Krogan's hand. "I can shoot you a lot faster than you can use your space magic, kid." There were spikes on his chin that bobbed as he talked, confidence on his tongue that came from experience.

"Kid?" Ashley had humored the Krogan to Wrex's chagrin as he gave up, letting his arms fall back.

"At my age, Human, everyone is." He holstered his shotgun, stepping off Wrex, only to reach a hand down, offered. Wrex had come here to kill, and instead he had only gotten embarrassed.

"Commander, everything good?" Kaiden asked over the radio, Shepard had only answered in the affirmative as she looked at the body on the desk. It was reasonable to believe it was Tonn Actus based on the trophies of Krogan antiquity that had been on the shelves around the affair. "You know Urdnot Wrex?"

The two Krogan, upon standing chest to chest, had given each other a once over. A Krogan greeting, to be sure. "Sorry."

"Hmph."

Wrex flared his nostrils in his glare. The prefab had some oxygen system going enough for this Krogan to not wear a helmet, and it was right that Wrex only take off his as-

Like ancient stone colliding the two Krogan had butt heads that made Shepard's own teeth feel like they were going to break. Yet, neither had budged as they both stepped back from each other.

"Fair is fair." Wrex admitted in that silent conversation between the two Krogan, finally looking to Shepard. "Nakmor Drack."

Shepard had been surprised she recognized that name. "Aren't you…?"

"I'm over 1500 years old, so I've been a lot of things, kid."

Shepard had tilted her head, she thought- "You two the same age?"

"Hah! You still exaggerating your years, Wrex?" Nakmor Drack had been a particular type of Krogan. One that numbered in the dozens. One that even Wrex had to begrudgingly respect as they walked to the headless body of a dead Turian, the two humans behind them at a safe distance.

"As if they would know the difference. Why are you here, Drack?"

"You first."

"Getting my stuff back."

Drack had given Wrex a look. "Your stuff, or the shit that you inherited?"

To Drack, the artifacts around him hadn't been artifacts. Or, at the very least, were the same as him. They came from a different time. A better time for the Krogan people.

* * *

Shepard had remembered Drack from an educational report during her time in training: He had been quoted, after a sufficient amount of pay, about Krogan battle tactics back when the Krogan had an organized military hierarchy. It was educational reading that she didn't exactly remember, but she remembered the name.

Of all the artifacts that the Turian pirate had collected, one had been still as operational as it had been nearly a millennium ago.

"The Krogan were smart enough to make a coffee maker?" Ashley had elbowed into Kaidan as Hitman had combed through the dead for identification and, as one of them had less than tastefully called, loot. Of the things that Drack had come for, an original Krogan coffee maker had been one of them. About the size of a rocket launcher by Human accounts, but to Wrex and Drack, it was a simple appliance as it spilled the Krogan equivalent of coffee in its sludge like consistency into both of their canteens.

"Heard that." Drack had said, making Ashley duck into the crowd of Marines as Shepard sat on the crate they set up the coffee maker at. Apparently galactic standards hadn't changed in a thousand years and thus the outlets and plugs still worked. "Want some, Human?" Drack offered the Commander. She shook her head, helmet off, the atmosphere in that prefab habitable.

"You could, Shepard." Wrex looked into his canteen. "You'll impress me if you do get this past your stomach."

Drack's pack had been at their feet, spilling with ingredients. "You know, most of what Tuchanka had in order to make this was shipped offworld by Salarians and Turians, if not easily substituted, but the machine itself? I got a tip about Tonn Actus few months back."

It was the same tip that let Wrex know of his armor, it also brought out, wheeled out. Its plates like stone. Its age written not in wear and tear, but in the scars of a rebellion only a handful of individuals remembered.

"Ain't worth a damn." Wrex commented, looking at it in its case, Shepard only making an internal notice that it looked so much like Mai's. Grey and splintered, its helmet barely held together by time, Drack agreed.

"This the only thing you're here for?" The older Krogan asked, gesturing as the rest of Hitman, on Shepard's orders, tagged and cataloged crates for him at the promise of a finder's fee.

Wrex shrugged in his armor, slamming back the coffee. "More for principle's sake. That and killing the Turian bastard."

"Fair enough."

There was something grating at the younger Krogan that Drack had saw through as he finished his cup.

"It was my mark." Wrex had missed it by literal minutes.

Drack had let out an amused breath. "You gonna tell that to every Krogan who gets their first? What're you gonna do kid? Make it up by taking it out on me?"

Did every Krogan talk as if they were going to murder someone?

Shepard swung her feet in idle pleasure as she felt for the pistol on her hip. She thought she got off easy today: not storming a pirate's facility and wasting time and ammo on stomping out vermin. Still it was important to Wrex that he had been there so she appeased. Everything after that, especially with who had gotten here first, she didn't want to intercede.

Wrex and Drack wouldn't have left her as Wrex pivoted himself to answer that, though Drack had crossed that distance first in front of Shepard, taking the younger Krogan's chin in his armored hand.

"When was the last time we met, Wrex? Eight years ago? On that bar in Omega, right?"

Wrex chaffed in Drack's grip as his arm came over to grab his, metal buckling, but none wavering. "Yeah. T'Loak was breathing down our neck the entire time."

Drack remembered the same. "To be fair, we were drinking up her entire stock of booze." The two Krogan shared a grunt of pride before Drack's eyes narrowed, his voice dipping. "Do you remember what you told me, that night? What you wanted for our people?"

Shepard had been interested more now. Wrex had seemed nothing more than a mercenary, ambition beyond that, it was curious to her. Out of the corner of her eye some of her Marines were on edge, but she had palmed them down. Ryder taught her to observe even if the storm was at her footstep. It was how people were able to define the closest details.

Wrex had growled, and that was word enough for the two.

"I made it through the Krogan Rebellions, Wrex." One of his claws laid on the nook of Wrex's armor, holding it as he let go of his flesh. "I have watched our people disintegrate over a thousand years. The original Genophage still lies within me. In all those centuries since, you don't think that you were the first to try?"

_The first to try? _Wrex had seen Shepard's gears in her head start spinning, start going, if he had to hear anything of this back on the ship they would _need _Mai to stop him.

"You think a good Krogan is supposed to just be wandering the galaxy like you have, after all this time?" Wrex said back. "Wouldn't you know, more than anyone, what we could be?"

"Hah!" Drack had let go of him. "Maybe I'm a bad Krogan. I mean, I haven't died yet, and apparently that's all our species is good for."

Wrex seemed wounded, but it was a wounding he would live through as he rubbed his neck where Drack had held, he pouring another cup of coffee as he pulled the lever on the dispenser, the device buzzing its slop out. "You never answered me on why you were here."

"Well you lied to me, first time around. So I ain't saying. Just getting your shit back? Come on Wrex, I wasn't born yesterday."

"I was told we were just here to grab the armor, Drack." Shepard had finally chimed in. "I have the ship."

"You have the ship and the authority," Drack raised his cup at her. "Congrats on being Spectre by the way. I remember when the Turians got their first Spectres. You seem to be of the type."

"Uh, thanks."

"No problem, but your Krogan is lying to you."

"Ain't lying if I'm not saying."

"Wrex?"

Being with Wrex in the short period she had known him, she had learned some of his tics. Admittance for him that had been truthful came when he wiggled his nose once, sucking in some air as if preparing his lungs. "A leader does right by his predecessors. Reclaiming their mantle is a natural sort of authority for Krogan who would seek leadership amongst the clans."

Nakmor, Urdnot, Weyrloc; names amongst names of the Krogan that signified blood and clan. "You seek to lead Urdnot?" Shepard tilted her head at Wrex, an eyebrow raised, inquisitive as she was.

For Wrex to admit that, it would to admit something far larger than himself. Why he had even thought of such an idea had been beyond him, it had just happened one day, during the hunt for some lowlife gangster with a bounty on his head. "Do you not feel it, Shepard?"

"Feel what?"

"You brought me out here, all just because of a simple exchange. It was natural to you to help."

Shepard pursed her lips as her eyebrows furrowed, she didn't quite agree. "Pirates were operating within system and I saw fit that, if it coincided with your own requests, we deal with them."

"This is under you, Shepard. Dealing with rabble." Wrex stared into his empty canteen. "Yet you came anyway."

"What do you mean-?"

"Why did you come out here to help me, Shepard?"

"It was the right thing to do." Was it? She asked that of herself almost immediately after. In the grand scheme of things, it was a good, perhaps.

"Why?"

"Because it helped you."

"And why do you care?"

"Because I can."

"Why?"

Really? Of all the verbal game to play Wrex was going to use a five year old's one.

"Because it's the right thing to do?"

"Why do you want to do the right thing?"

"Because it's the-" In a circle, into the infinite, unbroken. To admit outright she was a good person would've been vain. To say she wanted to be a good person was perhaps demeaning of her and all the progress she had made getting to where she was now. "What are you getting at Wrex?"

"Do you do the things you do because it simply is something you have to do?"

Something that drew within her very character. No explanation, nothing but a want that culminated so deep within her it sat right next to breathing. To not do it would to fail herself. Was it will? The draw? The race for a challenge in her life to fulfill that intersected at humility and the want for a good life, not for herself, but for others? She could not explain in the same way Wrex could not explain the ghost of the idea he had about his people.

She shrugged, snapping around and seeing her people. Silently motioning with her hands she had told them to proceed back up and out after they were done tagging cargo. Wrex had held onto his armored case tightly. That was for him to hold alone.

"He gave you an answer, Drack, why are you here?

Fair was fair, and he did answer. "I'm just here because I wanted a cup of coffee, and there are a bunch of other Krogan paying to get their own heirlooms back. Not all of us want to go through the trouble of blasting the head off of a rat to get them… Thanks for that, by the way. I'll send you a percentage for your troubles."

That was more than fine for her. Working an expense account was new to her, but paying down the credit she had made to in order to buy her crew better gear had been oddly satisfying. That and whatever she had drained from the pirates, because apparently, she had that authority to seize credits and material. It made her feel dirty, but there were worse things to do in her job than pillage.

"What're you doing then? After this?" She posed to Drack, his appearance today throwing her off just a little bit.

He had knocked the coffee machine unceremoniously into his bag. If it survived this long it could take a few more dings as he shouldered the fabric sack. "Taking some of the credits I make today and bringing them to my granddaughter. She's running some sort of business back on Tuchanka, and what kind of grandfather would I be to my ru'shan if I didn't help out?"

That seemed to wound Wrex more. The Krogan before him had a child, and then his child had a child unto themselves. Those lucky few Krogan who could say they had born children. Strangely enough it hit Shepard's material instinct in some measure as well.

Drack was just about done there, putting his helmet back on, but he had his words as he passed by Wrex and his own reward for coming there today. Drack glanced down on it, remembering how his model of that particular model had been destroyed and how many Turians it took to do so. A hand reached out to touch Wrex's armored shoulder.

"Take your armor, Wrex. Honor your family. Not your people. That is the only way you can survive this galaxy."

* * *

Wrex had dragged the metal case all the way up, Shepard dropping a beacon to Alliance command for body disposal at this site. Alliance SOP was to tag bodies. The Navy liked to keep a running count on kills per ship as far as pirates were concerned, as morbid as it was. The Krogan whose stuff Actus had stolen would hopefully get there first, but it wasn't her issue.

The scratch marks would hopefully lead those who came to that place in as the case rolled on the crystalline surface of the planet.

Emerson had been waiting. "Find what you need ma'am? There was a Krogan who came up and, uh-"

"Yeah, yeah. We're all fine. That Krogan was fine too." She answered. "Kaiden. Rally everyone into the Mako. We're leaving."

"Aye ma'am."

To everyone else there were better things to do, but for Wrex, he had waited for a few months to tag Actus. He had been blue balled, unfulfilled, but yet he came and got what he wanted. He was still, looking up at the stars, deep in a reverie pulled out by the only person who could.

It was Shepard, speaking to him. He asked her to repeat what she just said. "I said, I would've been okay with that too if you told me why you wanted your armor. Of all the ambitions in this galaxy, I say yours seems worth it."

"Okay with it?"

Shepard caught her words. "Okay, maybe not okay with it. I'm not qualified on making those decisions on a galactic scale… But, I'm not to judge someone who would return to their home to make it better."

"Really? According to the galaxy you are to judge."

She looked up into the starry sky and tried to find it: Sol. To find the Pale Blue Dot that orbited it, as all Humans knew how to in their heart. "I don't know you yet, Wrex. To me you're just an interesting Mercenary who wants to just tag along with a ride. You have zilch for security clearances and you've probably killed more people than I'm comfortable know, but… the only that matters to me is the purity of your mission."

He sniffed at her words, behind his helmet, looking down at the crate of armor and all that it meant. "Let's go, Shepard." He stepped away, leaving Shepard alone in the middle of her men, looking to the stars again.

"Hitman Actual to Normandy Actual. We're clear for pickup in my grid."

* * *

_Omake:_

_n._

_A special video feature that accompanies an anime, such as a collection of deleted scenes or outtakes._

_Example: "In this omake, the characters are breaking the fourth wall to talk to the audience."_

* * *

**Omake Two:**

**"I'm a complete hack but if I wrote it like this this story would be drastically lesser in quality and intent/this is a slow-fucking-burn for a reason."**

**Or…**

**"In the Arms (of Someone Else)"**

This time the Mako was there, and JD was given his privacy as he awoke from her death:

ARE YOU OKAY? She signed, close to him due to Shepard's parking job this time being a little tighter than they were used to.

He looked at her hands, but then her face, locking eyes with her as he calmed down from a high he hadn't even known he came down from. He decided he couldn't be sure, even when she was that close. Mai looked at his hands as they moved up, anticipating him to sign back, but instead, they moved to her, disappearing behind her head as, in her kneel, he had the advantage of her unbalance as JD felt her tense. He felt her tense as his hands wrapped around behind her only rest below her shoulder blades.

She trusted him, and it had only been disparaging for her in the seconds it took her to recognize, as her body folded flat onto him, what this was: A hug.

He hadn't known why he had done it, but he could guess: Some inherent curiosity to confirm that she was, wholly, human in warmth and touch. Holding her like that, it was an awkward angle as she was braced against the tire of the Mako, she tense, but yet at the same time fluid in his grip.

How many years had it been, and who had been the last to do this?

The answer paused Mai as she simply let it happen again, her own chest touching his and, eventually, he adjusting her to roll instead to be held at his side, her left arm laying limply across his breast, only to, for some instinctual reason, have her hand ball at the fabric of his shirt.

Her head had lain over his heart as he held her still, and only, after a lifetime measured in heartbeats, had he let go as his full coherence came back to him and he had let go. Mai had let go similarly, scooting over, her back against the Mako as in the shadow of the vehicle her blue eyes almost glowed.

Her mouth was open, her breath passing by her teeth unkindly as a stray bang passed in front of her face. JD recomposed himself, sitting upright, looking away as his mouth moved but made no sound save sputtering.

"What was-…?"

He had to lie. It hurt him, it wasn't right, he didn't know why he did, but-

"I thought you were someone else. Sorry."

Mai felt warmth on the side of her face, distinct from the other warmth taking the rest of it: the side of her face over his heart had felt a warmth she had never known. A warmth she didn't know could be generated by humans. Her own hand pressed over her own heart, but felt not skin, but the surface of her techsuit. She wanted to say it was okay, to forgive him, or even perhaps to chastise him and yet… There was nothing else to say if he had thought her someone else. What was the name of the woman he had a picture of? Dawn?

Though that was the foley of justification: JD knew this most of all. Mai was unmistakable to him. That's why that lie had been the worst he ever told. Brush it off, move on. It was a mistake on JD's part, and for Mai, something she would otherwise not care for.

Standing up himself, for a moment he able to see the top of Mai's head before she reclaimed her height advantage.

* * *

How easy and how simple would it be if this was how it played out. Though if something like this happened in story, it would cheapen it.

Again, I make no guarantee they do fall in love. Of all the stars in the universe, remember that most, if not all of them, cross paths once, only to drift away forever. Though I admit, it's very calming, very reassuring, to imagine people like this. If you read this chapter, you know a line that I hope got across was this:

To die is one of the most human things to do.

I will not forget that, perhaps greater than that, is to love.

Though admittedly that's corny as shit: JD, a battered and rugged ODST, teaching an inhuman woman-shaped monster how to love. Come on, you should expect better of me. I am a hack though, and what's happening between Jon and Mai isn't anything unfamiliar to Halo:

* * *

**Omake Three:**

**"The Rider was Lost"**

They stole everything from him, to birth him, and at the end of it all the only gave him back his name. His full name.

A desk. An office. A view over those that would, eventually, replace him when his body built for war rusted over in a life he wasn't supposed to live. He had his duties, and yet, they were never supposed to be his to begin with.

She wanted to reach out and manipulate the nameplate on his desk, from her projector also attached to its surface, but could not.

"It fits you, you know." She spoke to his back as he stood straight at the window, looking down at the fourth iteration of his kind. Volunteers, immersing themselves in the legend made of his service, and all those still Missing in Action. He turned his head to her partly, the pale skin unkindly paired with natural sunlight. "Your name."

"It's not who I am." He spoke in his deep voice, his massive form still standing like a statue in a suit that she didn't know how was made for him. She out of everyone knew his exact measurements; she had been inside of his head of all things, and yet he did not look, feel, or seem natural standing in the light of that planet. Distantly Covenant ships, co-opted and taken over by the UNSC, had been used to start de-glassing operations.

Reach had been the last planet glassed. It would be the first reclaimed, next being Harvest. Though there wasn't an urgent need. When the Halo fired it left a part of the galaxy ready to be reclaimed by the Reclaimers. Weeks had passed since the military tribunals and the Elite Thel Vadam, finally, had started to cede his authority to the UNSC and their wishes, leading a flotilla of former Covenant species back to their homeworlds before, at last, being imprisoned for the rest of his life on Sanghelios.

It was funny, to him, that he did not go. Nearly three quarters of all surviving Spartan-IIs had accompanied the fleet to guard Sanghelios and its prisoners. Those that remained would now be here, at Reach, to start the cycle anew.

He knew who he was: He was John-117.

Spartan-II. Commander of the newly formed Spartan Branch. Charged with training the Spartan-IVs: his replacements.

He didn't even sit in his office, Cortana had long noticed. His chair unused as he preferred to be ready on his feet, always, with the Covenant ships in the background. He knew that they were of no threat, he knew that nothing would come from them but revitalization, and yet he was wired. He was told nothing more his entire life than those curved and purple apparitions of ghosts made into war-waging ships had been a threat to all life.

And now the same people who had told him that had now said the exact opposite.

"Chief, your heart rate, it's raising."

He didn't notice his nails making cuts in his palms, he white knuckled every time he looked at those distant Covenant ships, but he had let go at her insistence. More than once she had more control of his body than he did.

"You're not fighting, anymore, Chief. It's okay." She tried to calm him, reaching out a hand he would be able to feel.

"Is it?"

A silence between him as he turned, the features of his face only now facing nature and reality as it should've: It had been pale, sunken eyes and a piercing gaze in shrewd idle form. He never had to hide his emotions before, behind the helmet, and yet now because of it there was disgust read. The remnants of freckles he had as a kid were covered by the scrunch on the bridge of his nose as he looked to his AI "assistant", as was her official term now.

She had tried to put on that same sassy face as always, but she was never good at lying. Especially not to him. She never made a promise to people she could never stand failing, and yet, he had asked her one day, in his once-in-a-lifetime moments of weakness, to stay with him. Stay with him meaning more than just the actual act. It meant for her to be as she was to him during their short time together from Reach to the first Halo. Being inside of his head revealed to her depth that she had been horrified to see, promising herself to treat him better, the best she could. He was thankful for that beyond words.

Looking at her, his face softened for a reprieve, the two dropping their guards as they only could around each other. And yet these were exceptions to their lives now: brief flashes of normalcy in a dead galaxy.

**"Commander Hartsend?"**

The name his mother gave him. The one he was born with. John Hartsend. The last of his family. To hear it uttered by other people was as if people were referring to someone else. In the back of his mind, beneath the conditioning, the years and years of warfare, he made the connection: it was his name. Spoken to him by a voice he heard only at the most feather edges of his consciousness. How important it was, and yet he found nothing for it.

It meant nothing to him, and yet people used it; today a staffer delivering reports to him asked for his attention.

Cortana had sent the staffer away, a sigh on lips that were not real as John fell back into the conflict of himself, turning back to the windows, seeing his Spartans train. It was different now:

Mendez had been told to avoid punishment for his part in his training to train more, which had been far, far away preferable to what had happened to Halsey. If he knew anything between right and wrong, he finally looked to the UNSC to judge, and found it in the absolute wrong how they treated her for saving Humanity.

"Chief, can you hear me?"

That was the name he knew, from a person he trusted. Of all the mercies of their new reality, she was still there with him.

She had a point, in the way she spoke so much more by just saying that. He had his duty, and he was still a soldier. That was all he ever hoped to be.


	19. 1-13: Networking

A/N: Now these are the size of chapters I want to put out, and sorry about the wait. I'm writing a script right now, and school started back up again for me, so I've been hard pressed to find time. If I have time to write, it should be for what I'm being, real-world, paid to do, of course, so it's hard for me to actually get in the best state to write. This'll pass though.

Liara and Shepard interactions next chapter. Along with, maybe, Feros. I'm still working out all the kinks in this ensemble story. I'm not giving Liara and Shep enough time yet, Shep especially, least my gut feeling. I'm having constant doubts about how, exactly, to progress the plot of Mass Effect without wasting your time retreading exact details, but also without leaving out parts of the whole.

Hopefully I'll figure it out.

I'm sorry I can't respond to all the reviews, but some killer ones I'm really appreciating now.

**Alyr Lin**, I appreciate you taking the time to review every chapter, and yes, I agree, Vidette Lim is definitely more in line what I thought of Mai. Of course I'm hard pressed to have Mai be someone so, at least at a glance, so beautiful. It goes against her character and development. She's not beautiful, not because she isn't objectively, but rather the air around her, her outer shell, etc covers that all up.

Also the reviewer who dropped a review a few days ago: In regards to this line: "a shadow of complacency on her eyes". It is, purposefully, a little ambiguous, however it leans toward some self-awareness of Mai knowing it's unfair to ask that of him. Should she verbalize why she is possessive JD would detest of course. It's this play between her culture as a Spartan, and how it doesn't play well with certain social expectations. She is happy whenever JD plays by the rulebook that they both know, and, JD, of course, is the one going out of the way to break off.

Anyway, few things I want to point out: Of all the people that will change the MOST from the vanilla crew, it will be Tali in this story.

* * *

**1-13**

**Networking**

* * *

She was a pilot once, in another life. Mai had awoken on her cot that day with the sudden thought that she had forgotten to mention to Shepard, or indeed any relevant authority figure outside of some vague suggestion, that she had been a pilot. Compared to her active combat and assassination skills, it paled, but when compared to the pilots of the UNSC and even her fellow Spartans, she was a crack pilot. An ace, by any regard, but Spartans were too valuable to be pilots. She fell into that weird subsection however between clandestine and combat, enough so for her to spend an annoying amount of time field testing Sabres over Reach. To have settled back into the cockpit of one to take out the Covenant super carrier, it was oddly, warmly, familiar to her. According to information relayed to her during her debriefing, several Sabres survived the journey, and for that, she would become, fittingly, an expert about them.

They were valuable even without their flight characteristics, and yet, they were reflected upon Mai herself. The technology included in the Sabres were something of a mystery to ONI themselves and the military industrial complex. Some of Halsey's MJOLNIR technology had ended up within them, inexplicably, without an explainable oversight that left those in the know somewhat confused, but all that meant now was the Alliance had access to a test bed for technology that wrapped around to her armor.

She opened her eyes to a ceiling she had about to get used to, the familiar vibrato of the Normandy in transit greeting her as she looked between her feet:

JD had slumped himself against the wall by her again. His sleep shift had been quite a ways away, but again he had nothing substantial to do. He didn't mind however as he folded his arms across his stomach and napped by Mai.

It was the night cycle, the lights dimmed and activity low. She had, stealth training helping her even now, slid out of her cot, her footsteps silent as she passed JD. Glancing over at the other half of the bay she saw Wrex and Garrus in their respective sleeping spots, Garrus also maintaining a cot much like herself. The night shift requisitions personnel had become used to her, barely regarding her as they went on their duties.

Tali had a bunk in the core, much to Mai's disproval. As a Quarian she claimed that the sound of it was much soothing to her, and Shepard had abided by the request.

Mai was used to sleeping in her armor, more often than not, unused to working out the kriks in her muscles and bones as she stood and stretched, the pops of airs audible even in that quiet. Her hand had reached to the back of her head, feeling over the neural lace she was outfitted with as she felt her hair. There was a grit to it that betrayed its looks, she taking the rubber band she had found and rolling its length into a pony tail.

This was the longest it had gotten in a while, otherwise she had kept it cut by her knife unceremoniously. She had hesitated in doing just that. Having her hair longer, it was what most of the women did on the ship, and, if her orders were to fit in she relented.

Looking back to JD, his head had drooped one way before his body righted it for him, a sway to his brown hair making him scruffy.

She reminded him too much of sleeping Insurrection lookouts. A thought flashed by her mind: She would approach JD, feel for one of her knives and punch it right through his throat, her other hand over his face.

Firsts formed in her hands as she almost slapped herself for even thinking of that thought. How dare she think of JD like that, it made her grind her teeth, it made her, almost automatically, walk away from him by the impulse that she really was a machine who worked on instinct alone.

JD slept peacefully that night as Mai found herself in the elevator for no apparent reason, letting it slide all the way up to the crew deck.

During the war, the ships she usually fared on had been ONI sloops, inserting her deep behind enemy lines. They were quiet ships, secrets as thick in the air on the measure of her, and even that meant something as her routine of PT and maintenance went on undisturbed during transit. It was the deployments that put her on the frontline with the Covenant that put her on ships of the line, bumping shoulders with the main forces of the UNSC. On those ships, she was given free reign to roam. No one would stop her by reputation alone. Here though?

The elevator to the deck opened, and two Marines from Hitman on guard that night had tensed.

She had shot them daggers, but did nothing but stand and stare back at them as they looked away. If they shot her for simply existing, she would burn down the Normandy, JD withstanding. Distantly she had looked at the sleeper pods, the forms of Kaiden and Ashley among those sleeping that shift. She yearned for that simplicity of sleep, but until a pod had fit her, she was denied.

She had her lunches with JD. If anything she only ate when JD did, but there was a trap in that. Not one that he meant. JD wouldn't admit it but he had been hooked on tobacco, and with it, came the caffeine. She didn't partake in the cigarette, but the coffee that JD had always offered to her? She had taken. In a space age, top of the line ship like the Normandy, coffee came from a packet of grounds; all he needed to do was add hot water. Still it tasted like shit, but oddly enough she still drank it.

_"You think it taste like shit?" _It was one of the only times she had heard JD exasperated in her short time with him thus far, as if she insulted his cooking. _"What do you know about good coffee Mai?"_

She had gone for a rebuttal but came up short. She never thought of food as a matter of taste, but here, she had formed one.

Before she knew what, she was doing she had a mug and a fresh serving of the stuff. It might've otherwise burned her holding onto the mug as she did, but she kept her undersuit on despite it all. It wasn't like she didn't know what Shepard or JD had pushed her on in taking off her armor; she only thought it didn't matter as the slightly acidic taste went past her teeth and she sucked in spit to try and beat it back.

Coffee had to be made a pot at a time, a fact that was very much acted on that night.

Mai's omni rung, and she glanced down. It was the Normandy's messaging service. She had kept it on mute for the majority of her time onboard, as did JD, and the two had never used it save for messages from Kaiden or Shepard. Still, someone had ping'd her that night.

_JOKER: I wired the coffee machine to alert me if someone makes a pot this late. Wouldn't mind getting me a cup spook?_

Spook. It was the term that most of the crew had gotten around to referring them two as. A term she had known once in two different contexts, and one of them had been fairly impolite. Thankfully they meant it in the military capacity.

To hear it even from Joker, whom she had never said a word to, it rubbed her some sort of wrong, but it only made her remember who Joker was:

He was a pilot, and so was she.

With a breath through her nose she had gotten another mug and filled it, making her way up to the command deck, passing by people surprised to see her.

Getting onto the command deck itself, Shepard had been awake to her surprise.

The woman had been astute, noticing her footsteps, which in itself had surprised Mai. Her gait had been quiet by training and for someone to pick that up, it meant counter training.

"Chief Gul." She said quietly, overlooking the galaxy map. Notes and beacons of her own design had been drafted up on it, she typing away at the console provided to her. "That coffee for me?" She asked hopefully.

Mai shook her head, motioning to the cockpit.

"Ah, fair enough. To be fair I've been running Joker raw, but, well, galaxy's a busy place."

Shepard ran her hand through her hair, adjusting the bun she kept her fiery hair in. Her hip leaned against the railing of the very Turian-styled command stand she occupied. Reportings of the Geth popping up had been also directly wired to her, so she had to contend leads with them. An arduous task, but she was a multitasker at heart. Her first report back to the Council had been lukewarm at best, but to them, that was better than they expected.

Mai had moved on, letting Shepard plan out her voyages, finding herself promptly in the cockpit.

Only the sound of her sipping from her mug had alerted Joker that someone else had been in his space. "_Hohly shit_." He had jumped up in his seat when seeing Mai right there. His eyes were widen before he put on his usual laidback demeanor, stumbling as Mai reached down with his coffee cup. "How the hell-"

"Training." She answered quickly, glancing at her tech suit's shoes. Asides from the trials on the Montenegro when the Admiralty was first observing her, she'd never fought before in it solely. It was designed for her predecessors: the Spartan-IIs. The fact she had used it had only been an after thought, based on those who were worthy of Cat-II specification among the IIIs. It protected her from more than the enemy however. It protected her from herself. The first testers of MJOLNIR were utterly pulverized by the suit itself when using it, the suit had allowed humans to even don it, on top of her augmentations.

She had understood what Joker had, if only it came up in conversation she had overheard in the bay. She had been Joker's exact opposite. No one had known that her bones were of steel, but people assumed anyway, and that had put her apart from Joker's own. A syndrome that rendered his bones brittle, she saw, at the base of his chair, a cane. She'd never seen him walk around the ship, only posted up here.

He grabbed his coffee cup, taking a sip before placing it on his seat's arm rest.

"You ever consider joining a basketball team, or something?" Joker had asked her, turning back to the holographic controls of the Normandy. "If I'm not mistaken you might literally be the tallest woman in the Alliance right now."

"No." Mai had answered astutely, looking at the secondary stations in the cockpit. All empty at the moment. Kaiden had been familiar with some of these controls as far as she remembered.

"Got any hobbies? At all? Because even the most stone cold spook I know has stuff he likes to do for fun."

"Such as?"

"Collect Turian teeth."

She was pretty sure it was a joke. Then again she had remembered some Insurrectionists who, when they did contend with the Covenant, who used to collect the scalps of Elites.

"Don't have any."

"Turian teeth?"

Mai glared down at Joker. "Hobbies."

He didn't see her glare as he thumbed a few unknowable controls to her across the orange holographs with such ease. She was used to a control stick and pedals, not whatever this was as a pilot.

"Ah, suppose I understand," He took another sip of his coffee. "Flying is my passion. Can't really have a hobby if I do this every day… You enjoy what you do spook?"

A thought. She sipped her own coffee, considering what she felt. Did she like a mission completed? Yes. The efficiency of tactical pre-planning and not wasting one bullet more than needed. A base taken down without even an alert? She'd be lying if she didn't feel a rush of satisfaction from it. Though she thought deeper.

The feeling of her knife, tearing across the neck of a Sangheili. The way a Grunt's neck snapped when she pulled it just the right way. She smiled thinking about it. She enjoyed that feeling. "Yes."

Put into words however, the second she answered she had felt so present. More present then she ever had before.

She enjoyed the killing.

The way preplaced explosives tore open Insurrectionist vehicles. Dead men unable to get a shot off. Her innate ability to combat proven as she, alone, remained. Human or Covenant, it didn't matter.

A lump in her throat formed. She wanted to explain herself for some reason. Was she ashamed?

"You're really good with words, you know that. Is that why you and that other spook talk in hands?"

"How do you know that?" A demand, not a question. Her voice dipped deeper and Joker had mild doubts about bringing it up.

"Word gets around, you know."

Mai had growled in her throat a bit, simmered by another sip of her cup. Was it a secret they had spoken that language? No, she figured. To understand it? Something else. She could live with it. "I'm not good with talking." She explained, finally. "I'm more doing."

"The way they had to cuff you in after Altis? I believe it."

Right. He had been here. A skeleton crew of the Normandy had ferried her from Altis to Arcturus, and he, as always, had been the pilot. "You care about opsec at all?"

"I just find it odd that the Alliance is hiring Cerberus mercs or something or another into their ranks." Cerberus. An organization she had heard in whispers and vague mentions. Shepard was intimately involved, according to shadowy extranet articles. Not with them, per se, but more having done stuff to them. "That why you and the Commander so out of sync?"

She rose her eyebrow. "You think I'm Cerberus?"

"I mean you obviously don't like our alien crew members. You were on Altis killing the Covenant when they came just like that. And you've got some wicked training and gear with ya. What? Cerberus didn't allow to kill as much as you wanted so you left with your boyfriend down there?"

It was an interrogation in the tone of a standup routine. Bold words for a man within bone breaking distance, and, oddly, Mai could respect that. "Wrong place, wrong time. I got carried away. No, I'm not Cerberus."

"Good. Because I hate only two things in this life: People who are intolerant of other cultures, and the Dutch." He looked back at her, his face obviously expecting a reaction. None was found but Mai's usual stern look. "Really? Nothing?"

She shook her head, he returning to the controls. Shepard had been keeping out of the way of Council patrol routes. She had a nagging feeling that, given that some Spectres had been attached to those patrols, and some very obviously held the same opinions of Saren, that she would stay out of their way. It was up to Joker to correspond. "What're you doing up anyway?"

"Didn't need to sleep."

Joker's face scrunched. "Huh, never knew anyone who was happy to not get some sleep on a ship."

"Now you do." Mai had answered back, finally bouncing with the conversation. Normally she would just listen to JD as he slowly recounted his life to her, his explanation of why the way things were, or, at the very least, his life. She was a good listener, he told her, and she held it as a point of pride. He deserved at least someone to talk back to. Maybe Joker could be her practice. "How long did it take you to learn how to pilot this thing?"

"Shit," He sipped his coffee, almost offended. "Why should I tell you? You seem to be the type to run me out of my own job."

"Just curious, lieutenant."

Joker rocked his head. "Flight school I was fast tracked for the heavies, but I always preferred the nimbler frigates. I would prefer fighters, but in that line of work, if I pull any maneuver, I'd feel it in my bones. The Normandy's not too different, as far as control surfaces go, from the Block 0 standard interfaces with additional considerations to the stealth core. She controls like a frigate but with all the safeties off and, obviously, capable of fighter like flight." Terminology that Mai wasn't quite familiar with, but she could pick together well enough, looking out the window at regular space. It was odd, to her, not seeing Slipspace anymore. Traditional travel in this galaxy was by far more elongated an affair. Odder still was the fact there was nothing mechanical dictating Joker's piloting. It looked as if he was programming.

"Dogfight any?" She asked.

"What? Who?"

"Hm?"

Joker saw the confusion in her eyes. "The Alliance is the only navy that maintains fighter groups. The other Council races aren't acquainted with the idea of fighters like we are."

It was surprising to Mai. She had forgotten when her flight prowess emerged, but it was somewhere between her first stolen Banshee to her first gunrun with a Hornet.

"It's alright, I don't expect a meat eater like you to understand the higher intricacies of space combat." At least in this life, maybe not.

"You talk like this to everyone, lieutenant?"

"Only people who won't beat the shit out of me. Thanks for the coffee, by the way, I was expecting you to ignore it."

Mai had glanced at the co-pilot seat next to Joker, unoccupied. Perhaps it was indicative of his skill that he didn't usually need one, perhaps the situation didn't call for it. However, it was tempting to Mai as she felt the seat beneath her suit clad fingers. "Pay me back by teaching me how to fly this thing."

"What-?"

"Contingencies. What if you're not able to?"

Joker clenched his jaw. "Doubt it."

There was a certain nihilistic quality to Mai's voice when it went low: the voice of a woman who had seen the worst of humanity and had been tasked to do something about it. Absolute cruelty, designed by people she would never know.

"_You don't know that._" She spoke, her voice turning into a breath. It was then and there that Joker had learned the mistake of any ONI handlers; those, specifically, who she had seen as tactically negligent. She wasn't a person to say no to.

* * *

Days where he had just straight up skipped the sleeper pods had becoming more frequent as Shepard crossed back across the galaxy: chasing leads, making communications with Alliance intelligence agents and being reached out to by other Spectres on secure frequencies. It'd been days since Liara had been picked up, and she had mostly kept to herself on the crew deck. Now Shepard had been frantically going back and forth across the Attican border: hunting Geth.

The Mako had seen its use for that effort, that much JD had known as he woke up and, between his legs through the wheels, he had seen a Turian with his back on the floor, oil and grease covering him as he toyed away in its drive train.

His beady eyes had looked up from his perspective and saw JD looked down at him, now awake.

"Mornin'." Garrus had spoken simply, sliding himself back out as JD nodded at the greeting, looking over to his right: Mai hadn't been there. He glanced at his omni and the Normandy's chat log. Joker was spouting nonsense on Mai taking his job, some of the other navigation crew teasing him for it. Apparently, as far as he could deduce, had taken the time up in the cockpit earlier that shift for the sake of learning how to fly the Normandy. He wasn't quite sure how that figured, but it was something for her to do other than religiously go through a mental checklist of: Gear maintenance, PT, reading, and then awaiting orders until sleep. It amused him to think that Mai had cabin fever.

Getting up that shift, JD had rounded the Mako, finding Garrus at a diagnostics console propped up on it.

Tali had been out cold by Garrus's usual bunk space, her face down in the table that Garrus had claimed as his own for his stay here.

Shepard had taken them out on multiple planetside deployments, and, as far as Tali went, she had been ecstatic to do it especially concerning the fact they were Geth related. If JD hadn't known any better, she found joy in it, applying skills learned in her short time on the Normandy so far to battle. Still, she was only a young woman at heart, so it tired her so.

So much that she had fallen asleep sitting with her helmet against the table, her forehead against the glass of her own visor.

"Yeah, maybe you should go in her place, next away mission?" Garrus had greeted JD that morning with a gesture to the Quarian, he going back to the diagnostics console as he wiped some oil off his face, fading his blue markings.

JD nodded, taking a glance at the diagnostics. "You good at this?" He asked.

Garrus shrugged. The other crewmembers and Marines up and in the well deck had become used to the aliens now at this point, paying no mind to them out of the ordinary. They could only keep up the hostile Marine act for so long before they got bored of it. The Req Officer had given JD a tip of the head, and then Garrus, the two returning it. "I offered, and no one else wanted to take a look at the Commander's handiwork, so, well, yeah."

JD dipped his head down. Mangled metal, synthetic fluid caked onto some of the shocks… was that a rock from Therum still?

"Normally, I'd rather be working on the gun. That's more my speed." He motioned up at the cannon, but gave a shrug. "Still, anything I can do to give us a smoother ride, I'll do it for all of our sake."

It was a swipe at Shepard's driving ability, but then again, JD couldn't defend her in any measure. He hadn't driven so much as a civilian vehicle in his life, but that didn't stop him from, inwardly, thinking Shepard didn't known how to drive a Mako at any sense of comfort.

"You got a car?" It was a topic that JD asked. Many ODSTs had been gearheads, dreaming of their kit cars back home. "… You always live on the Citadel?"

An odd two questions, but Garrus had shrugged again, locking the console as it ran a check. He could afford time to take a break. JD had picked up a towel while he hadn't been looking, it given to the Turian as he appreciatively wiped his face down. Garrus had existed in his armor it seemed, not unlike Mai, but for him it was warranted. This was Turian Navy standard.

Tossing the towel by his table, the two had wordlessly decided to head up to the crew deck. Tali needed her sleep, and Wrex seemed busy on the ground, reading something on his Omni. He had somewhat mellowed out since getting his armor back, but only to Shepard. He still hungrily looked at Mai whenever she passed, that tension in the deck tasting like metal in the air.

"Eh, C-Sec gave me a car, and I usually used it if I wasn't just taking public transit." Garrus had finally answered, walking into the elevator and pinging the level up. "And nah, I've only lived on the Citadel for a few years, since I got the job."

They came up to the crew deck to talk, not wanting to bother Tali take in some shut-eye, however who they found quietly by the mess hall table instead had been their newest addition:

Liara T'Soni.

She had been given some backup uniforms from Chakwas, the standard outfit of Alliance science and medical personnel, and she had fit in it well enough as on the table that day, she hunched over notes and data pads.

"No… no… Merely anthropomorphizing of perceived gods. Latent tendency to bring down to our level…" She spoke to herself, liens of data going by her face as JD and Garrus appeared on the other end of the table. "Oh! Forgive my intrusion its'-!"

JD had held both hands up, shaking his head, Garrus vocalizing the shared sentiment. "Don't worry, Doctor T'Soni, just having a sit."

She had started gathering her notes anyway until she locked eyes with JD. It was a human ship, so she asked her permission instead as she paused. He only shook his head. "It's fine." He almost whispered.

"Okay." She had settled back down, although unhanding some of her notes and regarding them instead. "Thank you, again, for taking me on the crew. Goddess knows that this is the better place to be with me."

Garrus tipped his head one way for a moment. "Well, I suppose most places are better than Therum."

Liara had agreed in a short nod. "The life of an archaeologist is hardly one of comfort. I never thought that I'd be caught up in terrorism, of all things." She gazed at the Marine guard on duty. She had recognized some faces of Hitman, and vice versa. Apparently, she had been known to the Ryders, both on Alec Ryder's account and his daughter's as a researcher itself. Familiar faces, as vague as they were. "Nor get caught up with a Spectre."

"Shepard treating you alright?" Garrus posed, glancing at some of the notes on the table. It was a rhetorical of course. Shepard treated everyone right.

Liara nodded fondly. "I have to say. I haven't interacted with Humans much, but she certainly has earned her reputation on their behalf." Her hand gestured at the notes. "Clearance on hundreds and hundreds of records for dozens of organizations using her credentials. This alone should keep me busy for the next century, though I doubt we have that long."

She spoke in hushed, polite tones. One not heard often on a military ship. For JD, he'd go months at a time without interacting with another civilian. On the Normandy, it was every other day it seemed. He had seen his recent share of Asari on the Citadel, and, sparsely, back on Earth, however this close, a table across, the part of his brain that identified Humans to him didn't need to work that hard to recognize her as familiar. The tendrils coming out of the back of her head had been odd, but the rest of the shape was familiar. Of all the aliens there she wasn't a problem to his unconscious impulsions.

"Doctor, huh?" Garrus tried for conversation. "I hear Asari doctoral programs are a tad inaccessible compared to our own species."

Liara had rolled her eyes up, almost as if looking inside her own head. "Well, I suppose not. Not many people have the time to devote twenty years into such a degree."

"I thought two years was long enough for C-Sec." Garrus had agreed, scratching the back of his neck.

"You were C-Sec?"

JD had been thinking a lot about them, ever since the Citadel. More than just the fact Garrus had been a part of it, and his father. There was a certain pang of familiarity that scratched at him: almost as if his mother was calling out to him to reconsider his life choices again.

Garrus nodded at Liara. "Still am. Just with Shepard on this. Just making comment on some of the more… well, academic processes."

JD had spurred for a moment, a lump in his throat that came out as Garrus finished, crossing his arms and leaning back. "Barely passed high school. Me."

The idea of Marines being crayon eaters had been as true in that galaxy as it had in his, and he hadn't, at least looking at his transcript, not been much better. Truth be told he had a lot to think about leaving high school on Luna, between his father's death, the sudden fact that he had realized that Humanity had been at war, and the decision to sign up. Though that was a story for another time, and probably one he couldn't tell in present company.

Liara had anxiously shuffled. "School's not for everyone."

"Suppose." He licked his own teeth. "Probably didn't play my cards right to get into this situation." He gestured with his hands up at the Normandy, at everything.

The metal joint of Garrus's elbow had poked his arm. "Don't be like that."

A huff of amusement came out of his nose. "All I ask for is a simple life, Garrus." Saying his name on his own tongue had been new, he stumbling letting it off, but it had been a first.

Liara had chuckled at the buddy-buddy display. "I too thought of a simple life once, but given my species' long lifespans, I doubt I would've had the choice."

"You enjoy what you do?" Garrus motioned at the notes again.

"When it's not having me be a target of Geth, or getting caught up in my mother's sins, yes, generally. It's so enthralling to have such a field that can encompass you so completely. It's a purpose I enjoy having. Asari my age aren't usually so lucky."

Over a hundred, JD had almost scoffed. He had only been twenty-six and yet he felt a hundred.

They chatted like that, for a hot minute, simple things, topics, introductions if JD had known any better. Garrus and Liara had been well enough making the bulk of it, but he couldn't avoid it.

"West Virginia?" The translation to Asari and Turian dictionaries hadn't exactly been clean, but JD had clarified when asked about where he was born, according to his applied story. Liara had never heard of such a scandalous place.

"Mountain country, back on Earth. Secluded as it can be considering where it is. Quiet life."

Liara raised an eyebrow. "You left it?"

JD nodded. "Wanted to find a purpose." He echoed her words. It was a hollow truth, but a part of the whole truth. There were a hundred reasons why he joined the corps, and when standing alone, didn't seem great enough. Altogether provided his excuse.

Liara understood. They avoided the topic of her mother, both out of personal reasons and security, but if she did speak, Liara might've spoken of the great expectations placed on her; of growing up in the shadow of a renowned Thessian Matriarch.

"Special forces though?" It had taken a while to peg JD was indeed special forces along with Mai. Garrus had figured it first. He was no regular Marine, that much he knew.

"I'm good at my job." JD shrugged. "Same as Shepard, I suppose."

"Does it pay well enough?" It was a question from Liara that seemed odd. She clarified however as the two gave her a look. "Not many people understand that the value of money for the Asari are somewhat skewed, even in regards to the galactic standard. Long life spans tend to… depreciate value, and any income I make from my research is from Asari institutions. It's not much, admittedly. I mean, it would just be funny if- if-…" She sputtered off. A hint of awkwardness, but again, the mission debrief she attended had glossed over one thing: Apparently she had spent years alone in her research. "Sorry if I'm overstepping it's just-."

JD told her how much he made.

"Heh. Not bad." Garrus seemed almost jealous as Liara stopped stammering.

"As it should be, of course!" Liara, out of lack of better terms, agreed with JD's pay. "I mean, as a military man, actually fighting and defending our society to allow people like me to-"

JD raised his hands softly. "Wish it were the other way around, Dr. T'Soni." How many UNSC credits had gone into the war and not the progression into Humanity? It boggled his mind to think of what could've been done, with all that money spent, and all those lives wasted. He might've not understood the galaxy, but someone had to. Liara had been one of those people.

"Ah. Liara's fine." She shrunk back. "I told the Commander that Liara is fine, so same to you."

The two men had nodded appreciatively, but it spurred a thought from Garrus. "JD's not actually your real name, right?"

This conversation. It usually took less time to get to it from over curious ODST squad mates. He was prepared. "Stands for Jonathan-Jameson Durante."

Liara had ghosted the name on her lips as Garrus did the same in his head. "You prefer JD?"

He nodded. "Easier to call out in combat."

"Combat. Right." There was an apprehension to the mention of it by her. Both men picked it up.

"Speaking of which. Shepard clear you for deployments with us? Don't know why she would bring you down, but if you're needed…" Something unsaid by Garrus. If she was needed, she should expect a fight.

"I am." She answered, wavering. "My University hosts self-defense classes for researchers abroad like us, however past that it's… I can't- I'm not a soldier."

Their thoughts drifted to Tali. Spunky as she was, as young as she was, at least she was Quarian. That had meant an inherent hate of the Geth, and her own personal drive was by no means anything to slouch at. She would kill, and Garrus knew that personally by the partial headache he nursed when she threw a grenade at him. Liara though?

"How are you with Biotics?"

Liara looked passed them, at the Sleeper Pods and at Kaiden in one of them. "Lieutenant Alenko was going to speak with me about combat applications, just in case."

"Small arms?" Garrus went on. She shook her head. The Turian flashed a look at JD. They could do something about it. "We do PT, physical training, down in the Well Deck. Tali's working on it too, with us, so, if you want, and I think it's recommended, that you join us soon."

"Ah, training?"

"Better to be prepared." JD had said with a seriousness that betrayed their casual talk.

It was a daunting thing to ask a civilian: to train with special forces, but these were extraordinary circumstances. "Shepard has me researching, looking into the Reapers. However if I do find time…"

"By all means, Liara." Garrus rolled off her name naturally, and she appreciated it. The conversation didn't last much longer, but it was a half-hour spent well, gently talking to a woman whose entire life had headed into a new direction very abruptly, taking her attention away from apocalyptic messages and the end times foretold in prophecy. It was the right thing to do. For JD, more than anything, it was a glimpse at a new normal.

"I should really be getting to sleep," she yawned, gathering her notes again into a neat organization and then a bag. It was still very much the night shift above. "But, thank you, for introducing yourselves. Things have been so busy and I don't think I would've-"

Again, JD raised his hands. "Pleasures all ours." Garrus only nodded to agree as she went off to a sleeper pod, exchanging with the Marine coming out of it.

A few moments after she had entered, it sealing shut, the two men were left alone and still some time to kill before the Mako diagnostics came back.

He wasn't much for beating around the bush, but before Garrus could make comment on anything else, JD had stepped forward first, pivoting toward him.

"Let's say I'm interested in a job." Garrus had no eyebrows, but he did the Turian equivalent as his mandibles flicked a bit. "C-Sec."

"You're kinda in your prime for a special forces, you know that, right?" Why would anyone leave it? Garrus thought naturally. JD would think the same, but...

How many planets? How many people? How many battles lost and lives cast down had he seen? Too much. Too many.

"You get burnt out, after seeing what I've seen."

Garrus grinded his jaws. He got the point. How many Turian veterans had he known that spoke those same words in some fashion? So it was like that.

"Pays not the best. Hours are long. And if you start fresh, you're gonna be buried with a precinct that's way too large with little support." As if he didn't already know that, and even Garrus knew he was doing a piss poor job of dissuading. Not that he actually wanted to. It always looked good on a record to recruit more officers.

"And yet you still chose it." He fired back.

"Well my father was on the force."

"So I guess I'll be better off then?"

Fair. Garrus held back a laugh, and it was something the translators didn't need to even process. Laughter was the same in every language. "There's an application process, and you gotta get referred, but… Yeah. After this mission's all done and we get Saren to answer for his crimes, I can vouch for you."

JD tilted his head at him. "Would ya do that for me?"

"Don't see why not. You haven't done me wrong. You're obviously qualified, and you know your way around police work probably."

JD leaned back in his chair. "Dad usually kept his work and home life separated."

Garrus rolled his eyes. "Lucky."

The two had settled comfortably into their chairs, JD, for the first time, at ease with Garrus as he started recounting his father. On late nights he would return from duty, on his mental state on cases that took him far beyond the call of duty. Worse had been the nights, he had paused eating his own food, was when he had been forced to take a life.

He was already an ass, Garrus said, but the authority and responsibility only drove him further up the wall. It obviously put him at odds with him.

"My father, he taught me how to shoot." Garrus spoke quietly. "That I can thank him for at least."

JD nodded. "Mine too."

"If I can ask, how is he?"

It was a fluke. An honest fluke. No foul play. No evil doer who had wanted his father dead for all his years of service to the cause of law and order. JD remembered seeing his father wither away, and how it seemed so disproportionate from the cause of death: Salmonella. He had been taking some medication for his stomach at the same time he had eaten some undercooked chicken that had been brought into the department one day from a fast food joint. It took only a week for him to die. Cascading symptoms and symptoms which wracked his body far further than anyone could pin.

It was only mercy that JD and his mother had been at his bedside as he passed.

JD became a Marine only a week later, leaving his mother alone to grieve. A selfishness he would never forgive himself for.

"He's passed away." He said once, looking at the table. "Food poisoning."

"Oh." Garrus's eyes widened, a thoughtful look on his face as he drew himself back. "I'm sorry."

JD meekly offered a smile, his mouth open, as if to forgive Garrus, to explain, but nothing came out as he remembered his father.

Everyone had parents, he had once told Mai. Even a Turian.

"Sorry things are tense with your father." JD offered after a few moments.

Garrus had shrugged, moving on the conversation. "He's a man to be tense about everything."

JD had held his right hand flat, but moved up to his forehead, thumb touching it, mentally remember what it had been the sign for.

Garrus had shifted his mandibles, seeing him do that. "What does that mean? Is that something?"

He hoped Mai would forgive him. "Father. It means father."

With his three talons, Garrus had tried to emulate the shape, bringing it to his head and mimicking JD for a moment. "Huh."

"I learned how to talk like that while young." JD admitted. "I'm teaching Mai now."

Again, his mandibles flicked. Her name had sounded so… soft for what she was. To hear someone say it was odd to him as a Turian. "You mean you two aren't already _acquainted_ like that?" It was JD's turn to raise an eyebrow as Garrus was coaxed on. "You two are… well, it just looks like you're close and I don't want to assume anything."

JD grinded his teeth as he gave an answer, not thinking too much of it. "We've been through a lot."

A battle. A war. An impossibility. The burden of a truth. Yes, they had been through a lot.

"I mean, you keep to yourselves, and even Chief Gul is rather cold to Shepard far as I can tell. She only really keeps with you." He knew it wasn't wrong, the way Garrus pointed it out, but he had never been as self-conscious about it until then, that night. Garrus had been facing toward the stairs up to the command deck, which was why he froze and JD turned around to see why:

It had been Mai herself, descended down the steps.

* * *

Mai had consolidated her knowledge, chunks at a time. Joker had been more than willing to teach her more than the interfaces and point her toward supplementary reading that he didn't exactly have the mind to teach, however she had politely declined that night after hearing him talk about the control surfaces of the Normandy. It was much too soon, even by her guess, to even think of sitting behind the seat of it, if that was what her intention was at the end of it.

She did say, once, what felt so long ago, that a plan was to just steal a ship, get weapons, and kill every Covenant on Altis. Though those days had long passed, she had finally figured. Her interest in piloting anything was just to see if she could, same as she did back home.

So a step at a time, and, in any case, she had other studies to attend to; to master first, stepping down the command deck to the crew deck, only to see two men, once occupied in chat, turn toward her.

Garrus Vakarian had frozen seeing her come down, as if caught red handed; or, perhaps, caught in her piercing gaze. JD however had been more used to it as he turned.

There was an urge in her to walk over, to join them, but with the way Garrus had frozen in her sight, in the way JD's shoulders had slouched and shown that he had been comfortable for once, she decided against it, even as he locked eyes with her.

Nothing needed to be said as he gave her a slight nod, and she returned it, opening the elevator down and proceeding.

When did she become so… particular about other people? About him?

She pushed that thought out of her head, rationalizing as the elevator proceeded down. She was more worried about him talking to Garrus, and how wrong it looked. Perhaps she was getting over dealing with non-humans in non-lethal ways, but on a personal level? She didn't think she'd adjust.

Her thumbs ran over the sides of her index fingers anxiously, she catching herself before her fingernails knicked her skin. The door had opened to a relatively quiet well deck, just in time to see a small fist slam into a table.

Tali's veracity had been making itself known in the recent days, between her insistence to be deployed with Shepard investigating any Geth-related leads she found, and her PT with the Marines of Hitman. She'd hold herself less, letting her throat echo out yells as she had finally been brought to speed on sparring.

_"Watch your finger nails, and my visor is more sturdy than it looks." _She spoke to the Marines sparring as she squared up herself. Naturally they went easy on her, the first time she was slammed onto the ground, softened only by a foam mat. Each session they went a little less soft however, and she went a little harder with her strikes.

That same hand whose palm had almost successfully landed a hit on Bannon, Hitman's most voracious Marine, had hit the table she had, last she checked, passed out on.

With the elevator opening Tali had immediately regretted doing that as Mai, wordlessly, emotionlessly, made her way slowly over to her.

"Problem?" She towered over the Quarian as the glow of her eyes betrayed a poker face.

"No."

"Doubt it." Mai glanced at the scattered tools and components that had been disheveled because of her fist, hitting the surface of the table.

"Nothing. It's just the Covenant-" Spartan Time. Hearing those words had made Mai's entire perception of reality real back before, like a whiplash, bring her back to the presence as every pore in her body, every breath of air she took in, fill her so much more deeply. "has somehow weaseled its way into the good graces of the Flotilla. _My people._"

"What do you mean?"

Tali had been awoken by an alert on her Quarian software suite, imbedded in each suit. She scrambled after for the extranet, seeing only an impossibility, and an indiscretion. She showed Mai the same news article she found:

**QUARIANS RECEIVE GRACES OF CITADEL. THEIR FREEDOM PROMISED BY WAY OF BIRTHRIGHT. THE COVENANT AGREE!**

Reading what Tali offered, Mai would've vocalized and given form to the same anger, breaking the table if she was allowed. She didn't though, letting it boil inside of her as she read that the Alliance, _the Alliance, _allowed the Quarian Migrant Fleet within Human Space, all so that they could start the integration of the Covenant into their military force. All for the sake of wiping the Geth from the Galaxy and reclaiming the Homeworld.

That meant the fall of containment. That meant a new galaxy; one where Covenant were not bound by their circumstances.

Damn them. Damn them all. Mai's thoughts were unkind as she hid it.

"I don't agree with it. Not one bit. The Covenant, they're not the same as us." To hear it from Tali though was almost as surprising. She held no love for the Geth, but for the Covenant? "These Sangheili, who do they think they are? Staking claim on Rannoch on the same measure of us? This is not their Rannoch!"

She held her own head in her hands, a headache unable to be touched as she, at that very moment, wished she could reach through her suit and feel her own skin.

"I'm sorry. I know with, at least with Shepard, you see everyone equally, inclusivity, all that, but-"

"I get it. I do." Mai had ground in her throat. "The Covenant is dangerous."

"No, no." Tali had shaken her head. "It's not that, even if they are. It's just that if our people, the Admiralty, is so easy to trust the first _alien_ group to sympathize instead of ostracize us… What is our integrity as a people? For centuries we've operated alone. It can't be that easy of us to just accept their help like that. It just can't!" She stopped another fist short of hitting the table, but, secretly, Mai had wished she did. Her concern, her anger, arose from her own people trusting the Covenant so easy, as opposed to seeing the Covenant as a threat, however there was something cathartic to Mai there. It was nice to see someone be so close to understanding the Covenant, their threat, in a way she was used to.

There was much to think about in the coming days, and as Tali looked back to Mai, all the Spartan could see was her reflection in her visor.

* * *

With that many ships, it was no wonder that not every single one could be accounted for. Especially with many going planetside and landing by the Solace and in the Altis colony. For many Alliance personnel on the ground of Altis, it was their first encounter with a Quarian. For many more still, it was their first encounter with the species of the Covenant first hand, and the Prophet of Destiny had graciously opened his arms, literally and metaphorically, in welcoming the Quarians and reaching an understanding over what needed to be done in the coming months.

What the Admiralty above declared was true: They had come to build an army, and the Covenant was more than willing to provide.

Shastri had advised Destiny in a direct comm link that he highly discouraged such brash decisions, especially one which would bring his people to war, but in the end the Alliance had no say over the Covenant's decisions. They were, ever since standing before the Council, recognized as a new entity in that galaxy.

So, as Destiny and Fleetmistress Karonee returned to Altis with the Migrant Fleet, and the Quarians amassed themselves for history, in a secluded landing zone, far away from the hustle and bustle of the more active zones surrounding the affairs, more clandestine affairs were being settled.

"Kaal Roth."

"Valcion'Lyth vas Noria."

Two men shook hands as their crews stood behind them. Male Quarians had suits not unlike Elites, in some fashion, the Jackal noticed. The Quarian's ship had been a smaller corvette, crewed by a handful of other Quarians. A sloop by any other name, small enough to land on a beach away from prying eyes. Kaal himself had to nearly swim out that far, but it was no matter. He looked behind him as a dozen other Jackals gave the Quarian a once over. The Grunts couldn't care less. As for the two Hunters? No one ever knew what they were thinking.

"This all?" Valcion asked, his darker armor unkind in the cloudy day on Altis.

"I was told to bring what I needed." Kaal explained.

Valcion twitched behind his visor at the chattering Unggoy. "I don't know if I have enough provisions."

Kaal had some crates, unmarked, borrowed from scavenge other Jackals had picked off the waves. Inside had been gear, food, needed equipment. He glanced at his Needler, it topped off. He was ready for much of anything, always.

"Grunts they have their nutrient paste. We've got enough for a few weeks from them all. Bottom feeders they are anyway. The Hunters, well, they're self-sufficient. As for me and my pack, we know how to pack for trips. Don't worry."

Valcion had been doubtful, but alas, he was being paid. By who, he didn't know, but it was enough for him to even risk this as he nodded to his second command to let the loading ramp down.

The entire procession piled in, loading taking no more than five minutes with the Hunters helping. This group Kaal had gathered, it was his own raiding pack, and they had trusted him well enough on Reach. They would trust him now as they disappeared from the Covenant. For good reason however, if they needed the convincing.

Kaal had accompanied Valcion up into the bridge of the sloop, gazing out the windows to see the mass above and the pure chaos of the Migrant fleet just above the planet. "You know what you're doing, Quarian?" He asked. He was the seasoned pirate there.

"This many ships? We won't show up. Besides, traffic in and out of the system is heavy. They won't miss me."

It was true as the sloop raised itself off the ground, breaking atmosphere and heading into space, using the veil of the Migrant Fleet as cover as every single type of activity related to the preparation of a grand operation, a crusade, was being picked on over Altis.

"Shady money from shady people. I'm jaded, but not stupid." Valcion remarked as he sat in his chair, motioning to his pilot to make way to the Mass Relay. "But even then, something this scale? I don't want to be with the Fleet when we go into the Veil. It's suicide. Running you guys out of system to a drop off? That's the no-brainer. Give me and the crew enough money to disappear to Omega or something."

One of Kaal's compatriots had joined him on the bridge of that ship. It wasn't Quarian, they guessed. Salarian, perhaps. Every Jackal pirate worth his gun studied ships, and the omni tool on Kaal's wrist had been short of overheating with that information he was combing through. The sloop was, probably, Salarian in nature, obviously taken by some Quarian's pilgrimage.

"Why would you have a ship this small?" Kaal's partner had asked, gesturing to one of the Quarian "liveships" as it passed by. Massive by this galaxy's standards.

"I run pickups and cargo for Pilgrims. Fast and quiet. Honestly, I don't feel too appreciated enough by the fleet, but not all of us can be star citizens, can we?"

"I see." Kaal had understood, looking at the control surfaces. "Easy to fly?"

Valcion leaned back in his chair, disinterested. The ship was very much fast, it, without much fanfare, already almost out of the system with the Mass Effect relay ahead of them. The pilot seemed unbothered as he thumbed a holographic button and the ship hit the nav coordinates, the shift into FTL painless. Valcion wasn't paid to entertain as he hardly moved in his seat to talk to them. "Salarian software has auto-pilots and all that. They love their multitasking."

A racist assumption, perhaps. Just as it was racist to assume that all Jackals knew how to raid ships.

That was the simplicity of life however as Kaal simply looked back to the other Jackal and gave him a simple nod.

Valcion'Lyth vas Noria, nor his crew, had much of a chance to fight off a dozen Jackals in those tight corridors. Hardly any of them saw the way their gun barrels turned toward them so casually as they squeezed their triggers, painting plasma scorches along their bodies and the walls of the ship.

He knew in his gut he was making a mistake, but not like this as Kaal stuck the pink weapon in his face, and a crystal broke through his visor as he turned. The splintering shatter of the ammunition broke open his visor's surface entirely, but the shrapnel had already done the damage as it inserted into his head.

The Jackal that had come up to Roth had been an expert marksman, even by Jackal standards, so as three shots further rang out from his Carbine, the bridge crew had all slumped dead without any collateral damage. Their bodies slumping to the floor before the Jackal had even breathed another breath.

"S'easy. Usually our targets don't invite us in before we take the ship." The marksman snidely remarked as he looked the way he came. More Jackals, dragging the bodies of other crew members. This was as clean of a hit as any. Fifteen seconds maybe?

Kaal had pushed Valcion's body out of his chair as he took it, glancing at the information at the captain's console. Everything was going to plan, and not too long before things got even more interesting. "Usually _galactic fugitives_ don't pay us for a meet and greet, face to face." He commented, looking down at the body. Thankfully Covenant weapons didn't allow much blood to spill. Still it was distasteful for him to look at. "Get the Grunts to dump the bodies when we exit FTL. I'll find out how to run this ship."

"Aye sir." The Jackals responded respectfully, if only for this reason, one so enthusiastically bellowed by Kaal:

"If all goes to plan, we'll be the richest Jackals in this damned galaxy!"


	20. 1-14: Changes

1-14

Changes

* * *

The Jackals were natural spacefarers. Humans had a word for this that they so romantically applied to themselves: Pirates. Swashbuckling thieves who pursued profit like a god. Underneath the Covenant, naturally, those urges were suppressed, however on those Jackals assigned to far away patrols, or even were rogue against the Covenant and still sought to raid and plunder. It was his right, and Kaal never forgot that, even as a soldier of the Covenant. He, more than any other Jackal, now realized he was free in this new galaxy. Destiny said it himself: God was not there.

Though there was another thing he always silently thought to himself. How godly was God if his essence was physical? Was High Charity's very core not Forerunner? Tangible? Understandable enough to power the station? By grace of being a Jackal, he was afforded skepticism. Many of his kind were like that, though not all.

"On our nose." One of his helmsmen cried out to him as he sat in his newly acquired chair. Bigger than him, but it was comfy enough even if it was taken. The command windows of the sloop had quickly been filled up with a rather quaint planet, by any regard. The Quarians were right, these ships were by no means difficult to command or fly, and that was why they quickly approached a planet they thought had been a farce: It seemed as if they were just led back to Altis, but no, it was a different planet. Larger than it, land masses visible and plentiful enough as clouds criss crossed its skies.

Interesting name this planet: _**Virmire. **_Kaal had mused about it as the ship ground to a halt in orbit. His instructions said he would be contacted upon assuming position.

A few of his fellow Jackal crewed had chittered among themselves as they looked down at the undoubtedly beautiful and ripe planet.

"Maybe we can finally establish a Jackal colony. Wouldn't it be nice?" One of them had spoken asides to Kaal. Truly it had been. In the hierarchy of the Covenant, the Jackals were hardly above the Grunts. If only because of his experience was he personally allowed to speak to that Sara Ryder. She was polite; as polite as a Human had ever been to him, and that hadn't been saying much. However after a handful of pat downs and tours of the ship he had been sidelined as she simply pursued her own research. She did, once or twice, inquire about the Covenant, however he had been given his orders, same as every single member of the Solace's contingent, to not give a single word on it.

Here he was being paid a lump sum beyond his years to do exactly not that.

And what of it?

"It's strange," started one of his subordinates. "being out here without the regard of the Prophets."

"I think it feels good." Kaal had dutifully said, glancing at his omni as the feathers on the back of his neck were slicked back. "Somehow, even shipwrecked in another universe, we have to play by the same rules within our own caste. How is that fair?"

It wasn't, that was the point of the Covenant castes. All of them defined by adherence to authority by the word of God, as handed down from the San'Shyuum. There God was not there, after all, and they did not come out into a galaxy without its monsters.

The alarm sirens of the sloop had gone out as the Jackals heard the Grunts in the cargo hold collectively panic, the hull of the ship starting to buckle.

"It's coming from behind!" The Jackal on the radar station had yelled out, but he was overwhelmingly underselling such a thing as a great shadow appeared to fly over them, casting its darkness onto the light of the bridge through glass and steel.

The ships of the Covenant had been larger, more deadly, than any in this galaxy. Though this ship, this design, the colors and how it almost blended into the very blackness of space. Not even the Solace in its prime could leave an impression as it approached them, its arms reaching out over them like a veil. This ship, compared to that sloop, had been massive. Maybe the size of a CAS-class starship of the Covenant, but it had left an impression far, far larger as it turned around to reveal a face of impossible geometry. No description able to be uttered save for the eyes peering above a metal, tentacled mouth. Glowing stars, staring into each of them, burrowing into their mind's eye. The ship seemed to breath, its height culminating in a curling tail that spoke to leviathans of mythos.

Moments, seconds, minutes; manifested as hours and eons to the Jackals as the ship did nothing but sit in front of them until a communication was beamed directly to them: giving that ship a voice.

"I am **Saren Arterius.**"

Kaal had fought ODSTs and helped raze worlds. He had subjugated his own kind and eaten the damned alive. He was a hungry Jackal, a well-lived Jackal, and, if anything, a pioneering one. He swallowed the saliva in his mouth and took charge.

"Hmph. You called?"

* * *

Shepard had been, as a general rule of thumb she gave herself, always empathetic outright to those she had no prior history with. Not to see it was a move out of ignorance and innocence, not was she completely simplified in her mind to it; but if she was to put her best foot forward in life, the only way she could live with that is if she assumed everyone else did the same, regardless of color, creed, or, in recent years, civilizations. Of all the images she had made for herself over the years, the Shepard that had been measured, empathetic, a paragon of men and women the galaxy over that transcended human morality, was the one that she thought best of herself. It was also the version that Alliance propaganda throughout the galaxy also propagated, especially in the advent of her turn to Spectre. Still, depending on what wikia page (each species, even in the turn of the extranet maintained their own more "local" information net) one looked at, she had been differently taken.

The Turians had spoken well of her in domestic reporting, starting from Elysium, and then Torfan, she being very "Turian" in her disposition toward pirates and, frankly, Batarians. She exhumed military service and its etiquette and, for the Turians, that had been of all things points in her favor. That disposition had gone down following Eden Prime of course, but she had been held in higher esteem than most public Humans.

The Salarians had been mostly ambivalent. She was sure of it personally. They might've had a file on her, no doubt, but Salarian public interest was never something to note outside of their inner sphere.

Batarians had regarded her nothing less than an antithetical terrorist, of course, given what she had done to many a Batarian pirate. Pirate was subjective of course. The Batarian sphere and its politics complicated even by galactic standards. One man's freedom fighter was another's extremist in the end.

It was the Asari, however, Shepard had learned that night, that held rather the most interesting view on her.

Shepard had, coming down from the command deck that day, another data pad for Dr. T'Soni. Liara, she insisted to be called, and so Shepard had abided.

"I just got off the horn with the Council." Shepard mentioned, an extra nice uniform on just for them. Liara glanced up from her notes.

"What did they say?"

Shepard pursed her lips. Around her the crew had gotten used to Shepard's atmosphere, passing by and holding duties as regular. Her presence, as per naval tradition it seemed, had finally broken in the two weeks they had departed from the Citadel. They were, save a few hold outs, comfortable with her. More comfortable with her than they were with each other, Shepard pegged. That was an issue for further along however. There was a lot of ground to cover and, already, she had already given heart-to-hearts, or at the very least, touched base with the majority of the crew. From the lowest ranked Marine to Dr. Chakwas.

Liara would be no different. She needed the interaction if anything.

"It was about you, actually, primarily."

Liara seemed impish as Shepard took a seat across from her.

For the meanwhile, Liara had assumed her studies in the mess. Taking the table as her own when no meal was being eaten by a shift. No one had particularly seemed to mind, and it was an oddity of the Normandy by its nature. Usually, even on bigger ships without a dedicated mess hall, the table or accommodations that were the mess became the natural congregation place of the crew off-duty. On the Normandy, the well deck had become that. Right by the gear lockers, an almost camp-site of fold out chairs, unused lockers turned on their sides, and a cooler had turned into where the Marines of Hitman, and indeed the rest of the outgoing crew had congregated. Even Pressly had sat a few times down there after particularly stressful shifts, communicating with Council patrols also on the prowl for Geth and wondering what the hell the Normandy was.

Still, she was glad for it. She only wished she herself had more time to do so.

She saw Liara's worry in her face, raising her hands up non-accusingly. "I don't mean by my regard. I simply reported that I had taken custody of you following Therum and would see it best you used as an active asset."

"Custody?" Liara had only gotten more worried. "Am I-?"

Shepard chuckled, shaking her head. "No. Don't worry. It's just the Council would prefer I use that language. In plain English, and you must understand how it sounds, I am, while simultaneously hunting Saren, having the daughter of one of his confidants with me. A daughter for, as far as the Council can dig up, was also missing for a few months."

Liara had fumed, but not at Shepard. "That damned University! I always knew their record keeping was off but-"

Shepard again raised her hands. "As you said, and I agree, having you here is to your safety. That and as far as anyone is aware of, save the most skeptical, you have no ulterior motives." Upfront, that's what Shepard was. It was an Asari idiom that translated down to: All that a person is is what they present. So if this was Shepard as a whole, Liara did very much trust her.

"I'm just an archeologist, Command-"

"Just Shepard, if you may. You're not military, so there's no need."

"Shepard." Liara tried it on her tongue before continuing. "I'm just an archeologist, I've spent my life on simple digs and, well, rather boring projects. Nothing like this. I don't quite know if I belong on this crew."

Shepard had shrugged. "Still, your experience in that is valuable. Your insight into the Protheans is paramount. Anything you can discover might give us the edge up on Saren."

Everyone on her team had excelled at something; the sum of the parts had been more than the whole, as always. Even when bogged down by the military etiquette and routine, even those uninvolved in the Alliance hierarchy had found their roles. From something as small as maintenance on the Mako as Garrus had put on, to the intricacies of the Protheans as Liara had explained to the crew when pressed.

Some Hitman had their doubts about Shepard, surely, as did the rest of the crew, but the idea of Reapers, of civilization-sized resets happening, there was a precedent, and the Reapers were the explanation.

_"You're talking like a prophet, Dr. T'Soni." _One of them had spoken to her in jest. It sounded maddening to think, in all the galaxy, they alone held the knowledge of what truly was in store and were the only ones doing something about it. Anyone in the service would argue they were making the galaxy, if not their homeworld, a better place, and would give their life for it. By what measure of weight then would it feel to harbor the sanctity and sanity of the galaxy then? To save it themselves? To know that would be to go mad themselves.

And the grating edge of her dreams, Shepard knew, in recent nights, what it was to go mad. She saw _them _in her dreams: the answer to an impossible question that eluded her as a mortal. Something so horrible and inhumane that it went beyond morality as she understood it, and to know it, would be to go insane herself. Though she looked into the abyss of her mind, forcing her to relive that vision as beamed to her by the Protheans as if her very life depended on it.

Liara smiled fondly at Shepard as she saw the appreciative spark in her eyes, however there was something else. Past the latent aura of her biotics, or the smile she put on. It was like a shadow, ghosting her. She was _tainted_. That word had come to Liara's mind naturally as she remembered what she knew of Shepard outright.

"Do you know what the opinion of Matriarchs are of you, Shepard?" Shepard rose her eyebrow, beckoning her to go on as Liara went on. "Well. Not a Matriarch. Justicars. I have not interacted with one in my life, however they sometimes comment on particularly dangerous galactic figures."

Dangerous. Shepard opened her mouth to say otherwise, but then she remembered who she was: before she was a Spectre. She sometimes remembered Earth-fiction of the 21st and 20th century, and how they promised an idea of warfare of her present that was… cleaner.

There was nothing clean about what a shotgun did to a Batarian foxhole that had been occupied, or what it looked like when an explosive strike from above sent Batarians and Marines alike hurtling into the darkness of space when they bombed a low-gravity planetoid.

"Hope it's not negative." Liara paused as Shepard made her comment, but shook her head.

"For some. They see it as a shame, that you won't live more than a hundred years." Shepard had chuckled. She would be lucky if she even made it that far with the life she lived. However Liara hesitated, saying the next, part, looking back down to her notes. "For some, like my mother, they think you'd be better off with a Salarian's lifespan."

"Oh?" Shepard rose an eyebrow.

Liara had muttered, but Shepard deserved at least to know. "Asari, we see things in the long span of time. Every action we take, every decision we go through with, either on the personal or even race-wide levels, we understand that they will resonate far longer and greater than most other races realize. It is a cultural understanding… We're able to see the effects of decisions with foresight… a gut feeling as you say."

"How does that compare to me then?"

Liara had looked at Shepard with bright, innocent eyes, taking her in, seeing the strands of loose hair cascade down her face from her bangs, her freckles not unlike her own. She was a beautiful woman, that much Liara could admit. Sharp, yet warm; something distinctly maternal about her that made her green eyes that of Eden and her smiles that of the sun. And yet there was a tiredness behind it all: behind the lines of her face or when she turned away from conversation. Liara had lived more than quadruple her life, and yet she knew all the same that Shepard had been older.

"There is a term that is popular amongst the Asari, Shepard. Every Asari learns about it in some intro to philosophy course: Every decision we make, and every choice we choose, has far reaching implications. Now some choices have more weight to them, are more important, of course. What I choose for breakfast is nothing to compare to the decision between electing one leader over another, naturally, but my Mother spoke of you as if… forgive me if the translators aren't communicating this properly," Liara paused, gathering her breath, before letting go. "She spoke of you as if the galaxy was approaching you to make those decisions, not the other way around."

Shepard's kind face had slowly, slowly, became neutral as she looked at Liara's hands. Soft as they were, her fingers rubbing themselves as Shepard became lost trying to find the correct term, the right term, one she had known as well if only if-

"Mass Effect."

The Asari nodded once before biting her lip. "I've lived my life, perhaps, in some way so I would never have to effect the galaxy like that. Looking backward, not forward. Though I suppose that's where another saying comes in: Those who fail to learn from the past, are doomed to repeat it."

* * *

Hours later, all section heads on deck; or, at least, in the comm room. That included the two Chiefs however, they themselves technically head of… themselves. Still, it was warranted.

"As you all may know," Shepard had began, thumbing at the galaxy map in the room. "We've been hitting suspected Geth outposts and pickets up and down the sector, chasing leads."

All of them had nodded. Kaiden, present, had actually been in his armor along with Chief Durante. They two had been just recently back from one such outing with a fireteam. They had hit another rather icy world hours ago. Shepard leading Hitman out as Kaiden took the improvisional fireteam that had rounded out the aliens and the Chiefs. Kaiden had never particularly minded. As far as commands went, the more that Shepard had hands on time with the rowdy Marine Raiders, the less time he would have making sure their bellyaching was subdued. Chief Williams, of all people, had found a better home on the Normandy with Hitman than anything. The not-so-friendly jesting they did regarding her heritage had only been beaten back by her own tenacity, which was, as far as things went, good.

Chief Durante had looked at Ashley with a hint of skepticism, Kaiden had noticed. JD would never verbalize outright, but he was confused, if not at her, but rather himself. How much damage had been done to him to still remember the squads he had lost? Ashley had taken her loss well enough, but it just rubbed him the wrong way, not that it was a conversation piece. What had been conversation pieces had been, instead, in the rare moments he and her did talk, was over training regimen and opinion of aliens.

In truth he'd rather be talking about what the plan was with the hunt, which was why he was okay being there in comms, his helmet sitting in his lap as Mai silently paid her due of attention.

The lead on Noveria had gone dark at the moment, and the Council had advised against pursuing it. What that left had been the open Geth problem that had birthed the galaxy's worries. Mai had been getting antsy. She hadn't been called to deployment for some days now, since Liara was picked up, and she was getting antsy. JD knew how that anxiousness manifested in her: her brow would furrow as she thought to herself, tucked behind the Mako as she read for what was the hundredth time galactic state of affairs or the biology of a Turian for… well, unclean reasons. She needed to fight, and the Normandy didn't have even the equipment set for her to particularly keep her skills honed.

_"Sparring?" JD had asked yesterday, regretting the moment it came out of his mouth as they remembered the Montenegro and how many men she had turned to pulp that day. Kai Leng had, among others who had been beat to shit that day, apparently, according to correspondence with Hackett, petitioned for Mai's court martial. He was denied and not very happy with it. Hackett and Anderson had been keeping up private correspondences with the two. Single sentenced reports, back and forth, confirming information and planets that Mai's information dump of coordinates had yielded. The first planets had been yielding fruit, slowly. Alliance survey corps had been "miraculously" finding beneficial planet upon beneficial planet. Deposits of resources that, by themselves, wouldn't be groundbreaking, but altogether had been significant._

_"We don't give them the habitable planets until after."_

_"After what?"_

_"They give us what we want with the Covenant."_

_That conversation, hushed between them, half said in sign language even, had put them where they stood. To think that they even needed to bargain still gave them a hint of despair, but their new lives were forming, ever so slowly. Perhaps one particular note of change came from a report about a planet._

_"Onyx." Mai recounted with barely a hint of humanity in her voice. "It's not there."_

_JD had never heard of that planet before, and he tilted his head at her as they both looked at their omni's at the encrypted report. There was nothing there where Mai had said it would be. "What kind of planet was it?"_

_Mai didn't answer that, but she said something else. "It was where we were trained."_

_JD saw it differently almost immediately. It was where she was kidnapped to._

_And yet it wasn't there. The only planet in Mai's list that did not exist. A fluke maybe, but…_

_"Should we check, at least, on Reach?" That thought had finally blasted JD's head after all this time. Of course the planet they knew as Reach would not be at all the same in that universe, but its position in regards to Earth, even now more than ever, spoke to it being a fortress world all the same. Human curiosity, curiosity in general; Mai had believed in a saying perhaps a little too stringently. Curiosity tended to kill cats._

_"Why?" She posed back to him. That had been that._

For the meeting Shepard had ran down the gamut about their operations so far and on the Normandy itself. They had been away for three and a half weeks now, from Earth. It had felt so, so much longer with everything they were doing on the day to day, however their mission had hardly gone on longer than a cruise at this point. The future ahead of them had been indistinct and long and Shepard had been sure to highlight it.

"As far as I can tell, the Normandy has performed its job exactly as intended. We've been slinking past early warning buoys for known pirate and third-war factions on this side of the Attican without incident. Stealth system is working pretty, and we've been inserting in and out of areas of interest with little incident."

Joker had chimed in over the intercom. "Wouldn't mind getting into a shootout one of these days Shepard. She's still a warship."

Shepard shook her head at the disembodied voice. "Let me handle the run and gunning, Lieutenant."

"Aye ma'am."

Shepard had finally looked around at the section heads. Kaiden, Dr. Chakwas, Chief Adams, and another Chief by the name of Weston. He had been the main Req Officer, and Shepard's main point of contact for supplies and weaponry. He had been, almost incidentally, the closest, proximity wise, to Chief Gul and Chief Durante just by consequence of his desk being right next to the Mako. He had learned to tune them out in favor of his own work, and the two other Chiefs had been happy with it. The two of them had also been there.

"Alright, hit me with those updates people before I deliver mine."

Kaiden had started. "Hitman Team has been performing with little difficulty ma'am. They're rather self-sufficient shipboard, and on the ground, well, you know better than anyone that they're up to spec. All Marines unassociated to them have taken on guard duty well."

Shepard had felt the tingle of her implant behind her ear. "How many biotics do we have again? Five?"

Kaiden nodded. The two of them had been included. "You and me are the most potent, however current fireteam tactics are playing our abilities down."

Shepard nodded. "Good."

Mai perked her ears up. How strange it sounded to her that Shepard didn't want to take advantage of a gift she had. To handicap one's self felt defeating.

Chief Weston had palmed his buzzcut as he put his cap back on. He had been an older man, a man who looked archetypical for warehouse management, and he had privately bellyached as much as anyone about his current assignment on the Normandy. Though it was more out of all of this being above his paygrade, between his CO being a Spectre, the Geth, and frankly, the spooks he had been exposed to everyday.

He grinded his teeth. "Admittedly five is a bit much for a ship our size," he started. "Add on Chief Gul's own dietary needs, we run about 20% harder on food stores than other ships our size. I'm not even going to think about what Wrex is doing to our inventory." Enough time had passed that trends and analysis had been able to be reported to Shepard, as was Weston's job. "It's not particularly an issue, but, we run thin margins. The Normandy is actually five over capacity for our crew count, and accounting for the Dextro Aminos with Mr. Vakarian and Miss. Vas Neema, it's not ideal."

Hitman's sudden and rather shady replacement of the Normandy Marine compliment had been a headache in terms of bookkeeping, but they had finally settled on a final number shortly after their first departure from the Citadel: Twenty Marine Raiders, five Marines, two Naval SOF, one N7-grade Officer and Spectre, thirteen Engineers and CIC staff (including the pilot), and, finally, four alien specialists at present. Forty-five crew members to a ship that would accommodate, at max, in wartime operation, forty. All of them sharing eight sleeper pods.

The Normandy was packed. Almost unreasonably so. Though there had been advantages of hosting that many away-mission capable personnel.

Memories of the Blitz had followed Shepard each time the Mako left the well deck on assignment, and the enemies she had faced planetside never anticipated an entire platoon of Marines come for them as opposed to, say, a standard three-man fireteam excursion.

Shepard ran a military unit to its most lethal degree. Even when she was fixing beacons. Because if she was fixing beacons at least the rest of the deployed unit could fan out and investigate the area. Nothing was simple in the Attican.

"The added mass from the crew complement doesn't seem to be affecting our core. She's still chugging along, especially with Tali's advice from Quarian optimization routines."

There was good news there, at least. Speaking of which.

"Chief Adams, be aware, we've been given orders for next rearm and refit to be taken away from Arcturus."

"Ma'am?" Adams had wondered aloud.

"Altis. We've been asked to come to Altis." Too naturally JD and Mai had looked at each other in a glance as Shepard continued with all their horror. "Admiral Hackett personally requested the Normandy to come to Altis. Situation report I need to attend, along with adjustments that have to be done by personnel at Altis apparently, seeing as the Normandy has been away for some time."

"Why Altis?" Kaiden asked the question. He had already been there and held no love for it. He had engaged the Covenant and had his reservations for it.

"Killimanjaro and the Fifth Fleet has been tasked around Altis. She definitely isn't moving." Hackett's flagship had remained over Altis with his fleet, and it would remain there still. "Altis is real busy now, even when compared to the Covenant." Shepard rattled off. "The Quarians have set up shop, starting local integration with the Covenant. All reports make clear is that their stay there is temporary and will be, with any luck, spearheading a proactive assault into the Perseus Veil."

Adams had been nodding along with Shepard. "I asked Tali, her opinion on this."

"What'd she say?" Shepard had been too polite to not ask her about the Quarian flotilla. Tali had obviously been someone who respect the sanctity of her people, including its security, however Adams had no such pretense, engineer that he was.

_She had gotten the broadband declaration over the Quarian net the same as the rest of those on Pilgrimage. It was unprecedented in all the history of the Migrant Fleet: to prepare to return to the Flotilla in preparation for what was called the "Final Journey". The one which took her people back home._

_The quiet solitude of Tali, working away at her console by the core, was surrounded by tension that seemed so unlike the young woman. There was, in essence, an aura of grit around her as she grinded her teeth behind her mask. She wasn't happy with what was happening at all._

_"Rannoch is for the Quarians." She said, when Adams finally pressed her on her opinion._

Shepard blinked at Adams as he recounted. It was understandable to her, on some measure. Would Torfan been the same for her if she had lost all her men during the final pushes on pirate and mercenary positions, only for a forgotten tactical asset that would've spared them their lives was activated and rendered all her actions moot? Deus Ex Machina. For many Quarians, the arrival and the willingness of the Covenant had been beyond words a blessing and the key to their plight. However for some, so ingrained in their struggles, in their belief of themselves as a people… It robbed them of what felt like a promised future.

"She's staying here." Adams said next, surprising everyone. "Even if the Migrant Fleet recalls her, she's opting to remain on the Normandy to see Saren and the Geth finished with."

Shepard nodded. "We've hit a few Geth outposts and pickets while out here. I've been handing her collected data anyway. It's good that she's staying, but uh, let's keep her in check."

"Aye ma'am."

It was something that JD and Mai had no particular problem adhering to, but Tali had been a source of some civility in the air of Marines and Mercenaries that filled out the Normandy's fireteams. She was, frankly put, an awkwardly placed young woman. He kept his mouth shut as Shepard scanned the room after saying that, he giving her a curt nod.

"Doc?" Shepard had referred to Chakwas, she folding her hands over her lap as she attentively listened in. Her head nodded at her. "How're we doing on injuries?" A few Hitmen had taken hits during the last Geth encounter. Alliance and Citadel Intelligence had corroborated that the longer the Geth were exposed to open combat with the wider galaxy, the more they'd learn. Shepard and the Normandy were the tip of that spear.

"Nothing major. Corporal Loke and Sergeant Black are recovering. I'd recommend three more days at least of bed rest to let the injuries smooth over before returning them to duty… There is another issue to discuss with Tali."

"Go on."

Chakwas smoothered out her uniform before proceeding. "She's requesting stimulants and particular nutrient packages from the Migrant Fleet meant for combat personnel. I can synthesize some formulas, and, given our next pick up is where the Migrant Fleet is, we can accommodate, but I'd like clearance from you."

Shepard had thinned out her mouth, a half frown on her lips. "Kaiden how many away missions has Tali been on?"

"Seven."

"She performing well in combat situations?"

He nodded. "For what time she's been exposed to us? Yeah. It's her will, more than anything, especially against the Geth when encountered."

A silence persisted throughout the room. They were all charged with this thought: they were making a soldier out of Tali by grace of her being there, affirming her role in the galaxy on that mission. She was the hardest worker any of them had seen, and surrounding her with Marines that were crucial to the mission? The outcome was natural.

"I-" JD opened his mouth without consideration, and the entire meeting turned to him. He couldn't go back on his words. "I approve of her current heading."

"Chief Durante?" Shepard rose an eyebrow

Some of the hardest fighters he had known were civilians turned militiamen fighting for their home. Mai could say the same, if not more; she had fought them.

He ran his hand over his prickly face, only to back to his hair. The last time he let it grow that long he saw the beginnings of a mullet and wondered, vaguely, if anyone would mind if he did grow it out. Special forces types higher than ODSTs often had relaxed grooming standards, and it was a slot he filled out now.

He looked to Mai in a flash, unsure if he wanted to speak on, hoping she knew what he was communicating.

She did. "If Tali remains beneath our sphere of influence her growth as an asset for Humanity exponentially increases, especially if she disagrees with the current state of affairs." Mai had spoken like so many ONI spooks that owned her before. Her voice was dead, and it sounded like they were at war. JD hadn't known if she knew that just now. The other section heads looked at each other worryingly before Mai continued. "Her current position and state of affairs abroad make it relatively predictable that she will be fighting for the rest of her life."

Hate and prejudice. Pure and unadulterated animosity toward the enemies of mankind. She knew it well. Very many Spartan-IIIs, grown up with her, had felt the boil in their blood that solidified them into who they became. Covenant. Insurrectionists. Whoever had robbed them of their lives, they channeled that rage into becoming Spartans.

Same as her. At that very moment, said into words, she realized what reflection she really saw in Tali's visor. How different they were, and yet…

"I'd rather not put Tali in that position, Chiefs." Shepard answered with concern in her voice.

"Ma'am," Mai, among anyone on that crew, had been the one who responded with as much stone in her lungs to Shepard. Shepard's affability did not break into her yet, and it was doubted if she would ever. "I don't think it's up to us."

"Then who?" Shepard asked.

"The War." Mai had answered so naturally.

Shepard rose her eyebrow. "What War?"

Wherever there was Covenant, there would be war, and right now Mai was still waging that war within herself. Mai's eyes darted down to her knees, her knuckles curled on them. "I mean..." JD had never heard Mai correct herself like this. "The presence of conflict. Given our current assignment and the nature of her existence."

The frown of Shepard's mouth curved downward still. "It doesn't fill me with great pride to be training another soldier for the sake of training her, Chief Gul… Are you training her?"

Mai shook her head, gesturing her hand to JD. "Tali's training is being mixed in with PT. She's becoming generally competent at her level, Liara is also being fast tracked onto the same regimen."

"SOF-grade?"

"Yes ma'am."

Shepard had puffed out some air from her lips, eyes becoming heavy for a moment. "I don't take great joy in putting Tali and Liara, especially, into harm's way, but our intent in their training should be of self-preservation as opposed to offensive."

"Tell that to her, ma'am." Kaiden chipped in. "Tali really, really believes she needs to fight the Geth herself."

Shepard's gaze became distant, looking to the floor, wincing her eyes for a moment before turning back to reality. "I'm building an army, yes, allies to help us against Saren, but not like this, if I can help it… In any case." She turned to the galactic map behind her, brought up, several points highlighted. "Now I don't know what magic the cartographer and pioneer groups are pulling, but we've had several dozen planets of interest within our sphere of influence pop up. The Normandy has been politely asked to check some of these planets out on the way."

Kaiden gruffed. "Honestly Commander, it seems antithetical to have us do this when we're tasked by the Council to hunt down Saren."

Shepard narrowed her brow with a nod herself. "I know, but we're still out here and we're an Alliance ship first, and that's my call."

Of course those planets were found. They were found because of one of the chiefs in that room, no less. If she remembered correctly, the UNSC Survey Corp was gutted and turned into a scouting fleet when the war began to go South. She only knew that because much of the map data that she used on her ops were from them. She had to fill in any depreciated info, so she wasn't unacquainted with cartography.

"We'll hit planets along this curve until we hit Attican Beta. Geth movement looks rough there especially and our colony on Feros has been hailing Colonial Authority requesting support immediately. Nothing yet, save the occasional probe, but it all points to something big soon." She drew her gaze back to the two SOF Chiefs. "Chief Gul, Chief Durante. I want you on deck when we head to Feros. You look scary enough to ensure the colonists that we're in charge, and hopefully the Geth won't make a move on them until we can do something about it. Any concerns?"

Mai had chipped up immediately. "I'll armor up now. I request to be deployed at any actions beforehand as well." She wanted the action, to justify her existence. If not she would go stir crazy.

"Aye. We'll push you and Chief Durante with fireteams to hit any points of interest beforehand."

"Thank you, ma'am." To hear Mai give thanks, it was an odd experience, but that was, for now, the most Shepard expected out of her.

The meeting went on, logistical issues, updates from the Council and the Admiralty, and expectations going forward. Nothing too out of there. Shepard was still an Alliance officer, and she ran her meetings like one: with as much tact as those that preceded her.

This was a freeform mission, and to be honest, it felt like the LRRP missions she had in her younger years, except applied to a starship. It wasn't as if she wasn't uncomfortable in this command because of it.

"Kaiden, be on deck, we're going to be engaging Geth pretty constantly from here on out. And if Feros signals for QRF we're all going in."

"Aye ma'am."

"Everyone else, be prepared for such a situation, but asides from that, we're smooth sailing. Dismissed."

All the chiefs had stood up, giving her salute as they shuffled out. Shepard had turned her back on them, toying with the comms console. She was gonna ring a call and it wasn't on their paygrade. Mai had been the last one out, but as the door closed Kaiden and JD had been awaiting her.

Mai's opinion on the biotic had been… odd, as far as her opinions of the Normandy crew went. Indeed, the trifecta of her, Kaiden, and JD had been an odd chemistry altogether. He had constrained them originally, after all with his powers. That was left unsaid, even now.

"How you doing, Chief Gul?" Kaiden had asked of Mai as JD patiently waited for her as well. How well formed the Alliance uniforms had fit on them now. A pang of betrayal felt in her heart.

"I'm condition green, sir."

"You know I mean otherwise, Chief." Kaiden had been more casual with them than the others, still, it struck a certain part of her to be called that: Chief. She had been in support of the Spartan-IIs, one operation, a long time ago. They hadn't even known she was there, providing clandestine support, but she was tuned to their frequency. They referred to only one Spartan above all as Chief…

"No comment, sir."

JD straightened his mouth and gave her a subtle eyebrow raise. Whenever he asked how she was she at least did answer in some soft formality. Was it really only with him? He cradled his helmet in his arms, only to place it back on his head for the sake of ease.

"What do you want, Chief Alenko?" JD had finally asked behind the muffle of his helmet.

"Just Kaiden, Durante. If Shepard's doing the name-thing instead of rank, I'll keep it rolling."

The amount of times JD had remembered he had been referred to by his rank while deployed he had forgotten. He didn't have the air of a Private about him anyway. For Mai, she had sometimes forgotten she had a rank at all.

"Alenko then."

"Fair enough," Kaiden had motioned his hands for them to follow, and they did, following him down to the well deck. "We're moving up on a small planetoid now. Not much to it, but a few beacons went dark that were set up by Alliance pathfinders. Doesn't really call for a full fireteam, and seeing as they're intel-based, I figure it's up your alley."

Before they had entered the elevator, JD had stopped Mai for a moment, tapping her wrist. His hand had formed into a fist as she tilted her head at him and she remembered. Rituals.

Rock, paper, scissor-

They had finished as Kaiden turned around, Mai getting in first.

"How's insertion going to work? The Mako?" Mai had asked.

Kaiden shook his head. "It's low gravity, but asides from that I'm gonna carry you down as best I can."

Mai and JD had looked at the man in concern before they remembered an aspect of this universe that had no equivalent in their own; or, at least, as far as they knew. "You would be able to…" JD had commented, remembering how he had held them both.

"No hard feelings, right?" Kaiden referred to how they first met.

As far as the three of them concerned, they were square. For all of his… space magic, Mai had seen Kaiden as competent a Marine XO. JD hadn't complained. The lieutenant struck him as a certain kind of lax that was absent from ODST officers. It was just the unknown of his abilities that made Mai tense. She did not know how to counter him, not that he was an enemy. She knew that Shepard had the same capabilities, whatever that meant. The three of them had gone into the well deck, finding their locks, but Mai had followed Kaiden to his as he geared up, and it had been a rather tense experience for him.

"How does one counter biotics?" She was blunt like a club and hit like a truck.

Kaiden raised his eyebrow at her in turn. "Isn't that something they'd teach with your regimen?" Mai shook her head once. "Ah, well… A few ways, but not anything a really well trained biotic can't work around."

"Basics?" Mai asked incredulously.

He went through his mental battle checklist on counter to himself. "Some special-issue kinetic barriers come with automatic eezo pumps. The second they detect biotics used offensively around the user they punt out some eezo to counteract." Mai had fiercely noted that in her head as Kaiden continued. "There's also being a biotic yourself, or having a biotic on your team that can draw away any offensive powers, but, that's circumstantial really… Why are you asking Gul?"

She gave a glare at Kaiden, but not a hard one. "Chief Gul, respectfully."

"Okay?"

"And just in case."

She was a hyper-lethal vector; she would be for all time. If it meant having to learn a new plane of existence then so be it.

* * *

She waited for everyone in the room to clear out, the door behind her sealing.

"Computer. Deactivate surveillance protocols in my current location," Shepard spoke loudly and clearly. "and seal the doors. Mark following time period until deactivation as classified and sensitive in nature. Authorization: Shepard Bravo-Lima-Two-Five."

The VI for the Normandy had responded promptly, the door to the comm room sealing shut and locked. "Command confirmed. You may proceed Commander." It responded.

She took in a breath and finally dialed the rightful captain of the Normandy.

He had become military attaché to Ambassador Udina on the Citadel, and to be fair no one wanted him there. The thing about old hard asses like Captain Anderson had been that you could only be a hard ass for so long before it bit him back. Still, it was a job that the Alliance needed him in, those days, if not on the Normandy.

It took a moment for him to respond, but he did, the holographic video communications going up. QEC, Quantum Entanglement Communications, had enabled the Normandy to have such comms with the rest of the galaxy at large. Still the connection was never the best. Anderson appeared standing before her in the comm room in a holographic, orange glow. Dress in his dress blues, he stood chaffed in them as his gaze lightened at Shepard.

"Captain." Shepard saluted Anderson promptly, and he returned it. "Office life treating you well?"

Anderson shook his head, knowing the joke. "Don't make me laugh Shepard. Now what do you need?"

Saren's location. A boyfriend who didn't hero worship her. A vacation where she didn't kill anything. Someone to pay down the interest on her loans that she took out to equip an entire platoon. Galactic peace.

Her face flattened as she asked. "Some information regarding some of my crew."

Anderson's face sunk in, and he was thankful there was the lack of definition over the comms that hid it. Leaving Durante and Gul alone with Shepard was something he didn't want to do, but he had confided in the pair that as long as they kept their stories, they would be fine. It'd be too suspicious to pull them off the ship with Anderson, and in end, they offered a net positive to Shepard, even if the greatest illusion came to fall. One that Shepard had now recognize in some manner.

"Go on." He coaxed Shepard on, and she sucked in her breath.

"I understand that given the nature of politics between the N7s, and our deployment capabilities, changeovers with associated assets are confusing. I've had fireteams swapped beneath my nose hours apart. So I understand if some dossier files for the _additional _crew on the Normandy are still yet to be cleared to me. However, if anything, I'd like to fast track it for Chief Gul and Chief Durante."

Anderson sucked in his own breath as he looked offscreen to Shepard. He was alone in his new office, still bare. Perhaps not decorating it with his personal affairs had been him telling himself this position wouldn't be permanent. Maybe after Saren was reigned in he'd be back on the Normandy. Maybe Shepard's curiosity was only skin deep. "You already have all the clearance you are afforded for the Chiefs, Commander."

Shepard's eyes furrowed for a moment, a pause before her response. "It's not much. Only their names and half of their certifications. Only biographical I've got is from them, and it's not more than a sentence each."

"Then why don't you ask them for more, Shepard? I know you."

"Because there's a veneer there, Captain." Shepard admitted, knew, tasted in the air. "I know intel assets when I see one. I can't trust their stories."

Anderson might've lectured Shepard then and there: On how they were all on the same team. Though she had known better. This was a Shepard who had waged a violent crusade against Cerberus, so much so that, in the aftermath of her gunning down of Cerberus scientists, several Alliance Intel operatives stepped down. All of them had Cerberus sympathies. Cerberus had been systematic of larger theory of belief, not the cause of it.

"You can trust them, Shepard, on my word."

"Then tell me more about them, Captain, they're just N7s like us, right?"

Maybe it would've been easy to just write them up as new graduate N7s, however the N7 corps had been tight knit. Their arrival would've been met with skepticism from Shepard and spread out to the rest of the N7s. That was something they couldn't afford. Shepard might've been uniquely her in her nature; the way she operated and why, however there were soldiers and special forces before her, and there would be after. Ryder saw himself in her, and she saw herself in Ryder. She wasn't as deluded to believe that her perception was unique in that galaxy. A good amount of N7s other than her would've been curious about the Chiefs, and that was proven by Ryder's own take on it all.

Anderson shook his head. "Chief Gul and Chief Durante were part of Special Forces trials coinciding to our anti-piracy efforts against the Batarians. Observation, especially, of Turian and Krogan battle tactics were drawn from. They were assigned to the Normandy for the sake of keeping experimental projects within the same purview." That is, on the Normandy of course. To Shepard, it made sense, whether or not the Normandy would've remained her post for her tenure as a Spectre, the ship would've seen action. Action that field trials would love to break down with the type of new that Gul especially had an air about her with.

"They aren't engineering projects, sir." Anderson winced inside of himself, Mai at least was absolutely one. "They were people before that, and from my knowledge of the Skunk Works and SOF-trials we run, they must've been _like me_ before that. Are they like, N8s? An expansion of the N-warfare program?"

"I can't confirm or deny, Commander." Anderson said sternly.

"This current situation is a helluva place to start testing them, sir, respectfully." Shepard bit her tongue; she was a helluva person to not tell secrets too if anything, especially when she had never had this issue before in any of her missions.

"They wouldn't be dangerous to you." Anderson clarified.

"They are. Chief Gul is. They were both flagged for Xenophobic tendencies and I see it in her; that trait doesn't come alone." There was something she wanted to claim, to accuse, but God knew that she had done enough for the word on the tip of her tongue: Cerberus. To name her as related would cast her as obsessed. She had already murdered enough of the Human supremacist group.

"As consequence of her intense training, Shepard. Conditioning is a bitch, and you know that. We went through the same."

Shepard shook her head at that, her voice straining, her eyebrow raising.

"What's so special about them? Even my file isn't as classified." She had seen how Mai fought, how JD had fought; it betrayed everything she knew of Alliance SOF and of warfighting in that galaxy. There was an unknown factor on her ship that had no right to be that way.

"I don't know what to say, Shepard. What you know of them, is also all that I know."

"Then how high does it go, sir? I'm a Spectre."

It was a realization on her part, and then to Anderson's horror. If she went to the Council about them…

"I'll ask Admiral Hackett on more info, Shepard, but until then, continue with your mission. You're doing well, and god knows what our skunk works are doing. That's where they probably originate from. I wasn't the one who asked for them on the crew, after all."

Why do people lie. Why are people predisposed to tell the truth by default? The knowing self-awareness of telling a lie had been so great that it made Shepard question things far greater than herself. She never lied about what he had done when the Alliance MPs came to her after her revenge on Cerberus scientist in broad daylight: she told them that she gunned them down on evidence that wasn't 100% conclusive, but she was willing to take that dare. History proved her innocent, and so that was how she lived now. Her truth would be proved by life; that's how she dealt with Saren, in a way. The Galaxy had held her back, but once he was captured, she would be free.

Captain Anderson was lying to her. She felt it in her bones. If Anderson was lying to her, then more than him had been. Chief Durante and Chief Gul had their lies baked in their skin and it pricked at her like a fire too near. Of all the problems she had now in this galaxy, her own crew? She was never the conspiracy-type, but she had her skepticisms.

Crossing her arms, her fingers tapped along the sleeve of her uniform as she nodded to herself.

"Commander, we're approaching nav point one." Joker had alerted her in the background. She would like to be on the CIC for this as the Mako kicked off. Just a simple recon and survey. Kaiden would handle it with some of Hitman.

"Okay." She said to herself more than anything, looking back to Anderson. "I just wanted to raise some concerns I had given. That is all, Captain."

* * *

There was a certain lack of privacy that arose whenever the Mako was out of the well deck. Not that Mai had been particular about that privacy, nor JD, however the man did like his corner to nod off in to be secluded out of want to make sure none of his squadmates did any hijinks to him in his napping state.

For Mai, it was just easier that way to be left alone.

Garrus had been more comfortable than some of the Marines (and Humans in general) to cross that unspoken divide in the Well Deck to chat with JD. Kaiden and Ashley also had dared such, but there had been something to how JD and Mai positioned themselves in their idle hours. JD had his back to the wall most days, either sitting against it or by his lockers, doing whatever he needed for the short away missions he had been called on. He was friendly enough, or, at least, amicable. It was just entertaining him at all, that those would find out they would have to contend with Mai, silently watching from her hidden place behind the Mako usually: on her cot or so rigidly leaning against the wall.

JD knew this, in some selfish sense. Mai had been acting as a buffer zone all himself with the rest of the crew and he used it.

Still, something had changed.

"Why the slings?"

The ship's lone Quarian had walked the difference across the bay during one of her off-hours. Off in regards to not her being in engineering or conducting PT with Garrus or Hitman. Her routine had been mostly the same now, finally finding her groove on this ship after a teething period, but several things had been added.

Her first true interactions with Wrex had been one of them.

_He was never really that further than an arm's reach from her, with how they claimed their spaces in the bay, and Wrex didn't seem to mind ceding it to either the Marines or any crew doing PT in the well deck. He liked being close to the action, to the physicality of it all. However, there wasn't much more than a word said between him and the Quarian. They were the furthest apart as individuals, one would think. Physically, perhaps yes, but she had remembered something he did comment on when she first started training._

_"What do you want kid?" He asked her, she walking very directly to him. A shotgun had been in her right hand. Not at ready, of course, but held by its midsection, like a briefcase._

_Wrex finally took a good look at her. She had struck something within him when he saw a certain type of rage, of fire, within her whenever she spoke about the current affairs of the Migrant Fleet and the Covenant. He recognized it, more than anything, and there was a danger to it. He liked danger. Her armor had taken a few dings, a few marks here and there. She hadn't taken a serious direct hit yet from a weapon, she more than diligent with her kinetic barriers, but her once, almost pastel colored suit had been becoming more and more dirty, dark. The decorative fabrics that once covered some of its surface had either been stripped away by her own volition, or grinded off just by consequence of the more physical nature of her fighting nowadays. Her hood had been let down, laying more around her shoulders and neck, like a gaiter._

_"You said something, earlier, about how I'd be good with a shotgun."_

_Humans had a certain flair for the weapon, Wrex recounted in his time. The thermal venting of it was done with a pump of an action. Supposedly it was a familiar sleight of hand for humanity, but for the equivalent weapons of at least the Krogan, there was simplicity in just upping rifle-designs to fire the shotgun-esque rounds that the galaxy had more recognized. This simplicity had come over to how he used a shotgun._

_"Whose is that?"_

_Tali had gestured at one of the Hitmen. One of the smaller ones: a woman, her own purple scarf worn curiously how Tali did. Imitation was a form of flattery it seemed. Wrex had scoffed. "Give it back." He said, going to his own pack, reaching for his own shotgun._

_It was large, especially for Tali as her arms quaked holding it. "Huh?" She struggled to say she tried to hold it like Wrex. The shotgun was more like a block of steel, accented with red. She could barely wrap her hand around the grip of it._

_"That. Is a shotgun." Wrex had said as he took the human shotgun back from Tali, throwing it back after he had grunted, getting the Marine's attention to catch. "Not like that toy. All you got to do is point and shoot, and it'll do you good."_

_Wrex had made this weapon look like a pistol in his hands, however in Tali's? More like a rocket launcher, and she struggled, despite her recent strength training._

_Wrex had looked to the corner of his eye. Mai had been standing there, arms crossed, wondering what he was doing. More than she would ever do for this kid, he thought._

_"It's-"_

_"Heavy. Yeah, I know. That's the point. Reduces recoil."_

_Tali motioned with her wrist to activate her omni. "There's barely any electronics in this." In most mass effect-based weaponry, electronics did play a part in recoil mitigation; that only meant, Tali realized, Wrex had born the brunt of each shot readily, and he had handled it as if it was nothing at all._

_"To shoot a gun, to use a weapon, is a very base instinct. This, and many Krogan weapons like it, are more in touch with that simpler way of thinking." He crossed his arms, leaning against one of the lockers on his side to that locker's pain. "I've seen the way those Humans, and the Turian, teach you about weapon manipulation but-"_

_Tali let the gun slowly down, her arms about to give, its barrel touching the steel floor. Wrex had paused as it did, Tali realizing her mistake as she held it up again._

_"The best type of weapon is one that'll fight you." Wrex glanced again at Mai, knowing she had heard it. "Because once you tame it, all that fight is gonna go somewhere."_

_Tali was silent as he looked up at Wrex, he looking down at her and his shotgun. "This is heavy, Wrex."_

_"Hold onto it." He snarled at her, and she did, cradling it almost. "What do you want again?"_

_Those eyes burned behind her visors. They burned everytime she had gunned down a Geth, knew it the best thing she could be doing with her time on the Normandy. Knew it would make her _ _ **father ** _ _proud._

_"Teach me how you use a shotgun."_

_Wrex snorted. "That's not what you want."_

_"Then what can you give, Krogan?" There was aggravation in her voice as she struggled to keep the shotgun in her hands._

So they had trained afterwards, Wrex finally given something to do as he taught Tali the very basics of a type of visceral combat that was heir to the Krogan way of life. It was almost as if, Mai realized now, that she was taking from everyone she could. It was very Quarian of her, after all: to take notes from the Krogan, the Turian, the Humans, on how to fight. It was an eventuality that she still asked of the two enigmas of the well deck.

JD had been snoozing, but her words woke him as Mai waited for his entry into the question.

"The slings?" JD spoke, putting the conversation into his head as he jostled himself awake, glancing at his SMG, partially disassembled on his workbench. Of that, slings had been taped on the front and back of it. The same had been said of Mai's DMR.

As an ODST, he had preferred it. Being jostled around as he was the magnetic holds on his backpack or even his holster wasn't always ideal. Slings had been used for centuries before him, and if it still worked, it wasn't outdated per se. Here those magnetic holster principles combined with the compartmentalization of firearms had made his own preferences seem even more dated, but still, the habits stuck.

Mai rose her hands for a moment, before her eyes had darted down to her rifle in her locker. As JD rose to stand besides her, she went back, grabbing it, slinging it around her form. It was loose on her, given that it was adjusted for her inside MJOLNIR, however the principle was still the same.

"I can… demonstrate. Chief Durante?"

There was a pang of fear in his heart as he realized Mai was walking toward the rollout mats that the Marines sparred on. He had never sparred with a Spartan, and memories of those broken Alliance N-operators on the Montenegro came back to him. Though another thought rose to him.

He trusted her.

He had tapped her elbow before she left arm's length, she turning around as his index finger hooked once before pointing at her, pointing down, then bringing both his hands together in fists and making thumbs in opposite directions, both hands going flat afterwards.

DO YOU NEED ANYTHING

Her thin mouth ghosted No.

How naturally she had understood it. There was a pang of pride within JD that she had been learning well enough, he following her as the meek crowd began to gather. It was Mai's first time on the mat, or the "ring" as many of the Marines off hand called it. JD had wondered where Garrus was, but one sweep and he realized he must've been with Kaiden out on the current deployment.

The mat hadn't been too big, just big enough for people to throw themselves around without hitting the steel floor, which was enough for grapples and tosses. JD took to one side as Mai found the other.

If he had to fight her, what would he do? Lesser men had tried, and failed. What chance did he have as-

Mai looked directly into his eyes. "React."

She pressed forward with her rifle towards him, violently.

Instinctually JD had raised his hands up, shifting head left as his arms banged the side of her DMR, dragging it down.

Spartan Time.

Mai had felt the hit of combat, fake as it was, impact her mind. The way each Marine around was standing, the way Wrex stood over all of them, curiously watching, eye lashes and where they all were looking, minutiae that made the difference was taken in excruciatingly by her as she felt JD knock her gun down. It would never be enough strength to actually knock it out of her hand, and in this situation she probably would've just pulled the trigger and send a shot into his gut, but for demonstration's sake she-

The gun collapsed out of her hand, however it went taut and hung over her midsection as Mai's hands instead found new purpose: JD used both his arms to deflect, so her left hand had grabbed both of them, binding them together as her right arm barred across his chest and she pushed forward. She put some pull on JD's arms up, not wanting the impact of his back against the mat to be that bad, but there was weight to it as it happened.

Her hands had left him as her knee took its place on his chest, grabbing back her gun and aiming up, sweeping the room.

"Retention." She finally said, looking at Tali as she kneeled on JD's chest. "Without a sling, if a weapon is knocked out of my hand, it would be knocked out of my reach. Even if I deal with a hostile who forced it out of my hand, I'd be momentarily without a weapon."

"Ah." Tali nodded her head, "How often does one get close enough to do that?"

Mai tilted her head a bit. "For me? Common."

She felt some patting on her knee. "Mai." A pained breath.

She sucked in some breath of her own as she forgot to get off JD, the pressure on his chest a little much. It was as much of a wakeup as anything.

"CQC?" One of the Hitmen had asked. It was the purple scarf wearing Marine: Loke. She had been most friendly to Tali, if anything. They were of the same size, so a lot of pointers had been given by her to the Quarian. "You know it?"

Mai looked to the speaker the mental note made unconsciously: She was the same sort of brown as her. She still hadn't gotten off of JD.

"Mai please."

"Oh." The Spartan had gotten off the ODST, he standing up again after taking a breath.

"Anything else?"

Mai had given her short, spoken lecture further. Just her preference, and JD's by extension, on having a sling. Recoil management wasn't as much of an issue for her, but JD explained further, gesturing to Mai's rifle. She had allowed him to have it as he slung it around himself. "Stay still?" He whispered to her, and she did. "Let's say that you're on cover, and you need a steady base to make a shot." He had then wrapped the slack of the sling around his left arm holding the head of the sling where it connected to the gun. "Pretend she's cover."

"Ain't she cover to you anyway?" A Marine leered.

He ignored as he pressed against Mai's arm, pulling the sling taut as the rifle's bore was against her arm.

"Stabilizing base."

Mai nodded in agreement, even as she was used as a prop. It wasn't as if she hadn't been described as a wall before.

"Can I try?" Tali asked, arms out.

Mai had answered for her. "Not me."

Tali had gotten the implication. JD was allowed that contact. Not anyone else.

It was basic stuff that the two had just demonstrated, but it was enumerated skills. Skills that were picked up, not explicitly taught save for experience. Experience that many of them there had, but not the mind to teach Tali outright. Still JD could empathize. He had been in her place once: thrust into a type of warfighter grade above what he had been trained for initially.

"We're picking up the fireteam now. Next fireteam get ready ASAP." The intercom from Joker had rung out. That just meant JD and Mai were next out with a token group. They were assigned as leads. It was perhaps a daunting task, but nothing that they couldn't do. As much as it was to his ire, it just meant that JD was lead.

He breathed out tiredly as he spotted his people. Shepard had decided the fireteam compositions out, they just had to play ball.

"Tali, Loke, Doc. Ready up." To be in the command position now, it made his voice just a little deeper by instinct. It struck him weird, if anything.

The three individuals called out had nodded respectfully. Mai didn't need to be called, still she needed her help.

Her armor hadn't been collecting dust in its locker, if only because Mai had diligently gone over its details with a rake every day, but this was the longest, to her, it felt as if she had been without it on. To put it back on again, help would've been nice.

The ODST BDU was donned in short order, JD zipping the seals and activating his HUD as he had all his life. Mai had awaited him however, she getting the parts of her armor out. What privilege did he have nowadays, to bear witness to something like a Spartan. His privilege went deeper.

"Sorry, by the way." Mai's voice was muffled through his hearing protection. Her eyes avoided him, but she went on. "For using you."

"It's fine. Just give me a heads up? Yeah?"

"Okay." There was a nod there, soft as it was, before it went away and Mai slipped into her suit's shoes, her Alliance uniform sliding off as she was left with just her skintight tech suit "Still remember?"

Did he still remember how to help her put on MJOLNIR? He could try, taking her leg armor shell and kneeling before her. He knew what this looked like to any watching, especially as his hands formed around her leg, clamping the armor together as he felt for the magnetic latches to kick in. At crotch level he had tried to avoid staring forward, but looking up had presented a certain view that she had covered up as she put on her chest armor, leaving JD to deal with anything below her waist.

There was no way he could take this as anything but technical assistance, he told himself. Not as a red-blooded man who had made it a recent life goal to see this woman as nothing but human and anything that that entailed. Nothing complicated about that as he gingerly placed the armor at the base of her spine and damned him for the variance that made him shift up or down.

"My helmet?" JD had finished around the same time Mai had, locking some of the last mechanical bits with her knife. She had gestured toward that distinctive helmet, in her locker. The Alliance had held against giving her the same red accents as they did his armor, probably out of fear of upsetting her, but still that just meant the impression of a ghost was with her in color. Wolf grey, colluding with shadows.

He picked up her helmet, but slowed himself as he took a step back toward her waiting.

The suit gave her a few more inches, now truly towering over him. He looked up though, and she looked down. Something felt… off, now. Seeing him with that ODST helmet on. It was JD behind it, sure, but she had become used to seeing him; his face. Hesitation was in JD's hands as he held the helmet back for a second, looking at Mai's face.

Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be. A small private moment that they knew had washed over them as JD finally gave her her helmet and she in turn felt that same hesitation. "I won't… keep it on, always." She bit a piece of the flesh in her mouth as she said it, unsure of what she was saying, but still compelled to talk those words anyway.

He nodded. Donning the uniform, his voice disappeared, actions dictated his answers.

Did Mai prefer him like that? She couldn't quite say as she glanced to her side. A few Marines were looking, and her gaze cast them away as she finally put back on that helmet. The return to her filled her with some obtuse refreshment in her lungs, however it was muted now, finding the ODST in front of her.

Even a universe away, JD thought as he stepped back, how much had things really changed? They were still expected to wear this armor, be who they were trained to be.

Where did change come from then? A question he thought of as he looked at a Spartan, and a Spartan looked through him.  
Tali had taken one of her discarded fabrics from her suit, wringing it tight before wrapping it around her newly acquired shotgun, borrowed from Wrex (_"Lose it and you'll be my servant for the rest of your short life, welp."). _Shepard had stood besides Joker as the Normandy zoomed through the planet's atmosphere, en route to pick up Kaiden and his fireteam, her fingers making indents into the pilot's chair as her mind was a thousand miles away.

His father had an answer, and he heard his voice in his head.

_"The more things change, the more they stay the same, Jay-Jay."_


	21. 1-15: The Look on your Face

**A/N: **Sorry I've been slacking on the A/N recently, but hey I'm celebrating hitting over 1k followers. Really? That many people are that interested in this bog-standard fanfiction tale? Oh you give me too much credit. Don't you know I'm the type of writer to fundamentally ruin everything the longer I go on?

Anyway, few review responses:

Parker59 asked "Does JD have a ODST flag in-between his armor? Or for that matter any other objects from his Universe? I can't imagine he didn't have at least one photo or object in his pouches/Helmet, as many warriors have always done."

**JD brought over two things that fall within this lien: A picture of Dawn in a sundress, and the flag of his original ODST Unit. Both are kept in his locker, and will be brought to question when I think it'll be right.**

**As for Mai, the necklace of her Wheel of Dharma is her own keepsake.**

Alyr Lin said "Our Tali sure is growing quite vicious isn't she compared to canon?"

**Generally, yeah. There's a clear line I'm drawing from what she was/would be, and what she is now/will become. She is becoming sort of a... reflection? If that's the right word, of what other ME stories tend to do when they get this "advantage" from exposure to the Halo-universe or an OP humanity. She'll be clashing with her canon-self and the self she is becoming in this story in such a way that'll really be interesting when we get to what would be ME2. I might be taking the liberties of her devotion of her people a little OOC, but it's in line to her being the way the Quarians are presented in ME1 via her, as their sole representative.**

Francisco914 said "You love to recycle your characters don't you? I'm not saying it's a bad thing... I just noticed. Esp ones from Manifest Destiny."

**Ah I have to keep 'em on tap, or else I get rusty with them, especially if I'm rewriting MD. That being said if you did read MD, you might notice a particular, charming, cowboy missing from Hitman...**

In General:

**Feros next chapter. Me shaping Liara up. And then after Feros, back to Altis. And then we're actually a little over halfway done with ME1? Huh. Well in that case time/progression might get a bit more freeform. A good way to view this is just, like, playing ME1 and the amount of sidetracking most people do, because that is what my Shep is doing as well. Gives me some wiggle room.**

**I want to properly communicate SHep is doing this with the Normandy and just hitting side missions like a motherfucker, building assets and connections offscreen, so I might have to dedicate something to that, but also I'm trying to not drag this shit out...**

**Oh well, we'll see.**

**By the way, coming clean, I'm the writer, among other things, for a videogame called Project Wingman right now, so if you're wondering what I'm doing that's where it is. If you're a fan of the combat flight action genre, check it out, otherwise, well... wishlist us on Steam? That helps us out.**

**Anyway, read and enjoy. I'm currently writing a Christmas fic and a Deltarune Krusie story right now as well, so there's that, along with the aforementioned Manifest Destiny rewrite.**

* * *

**1-15**

**The Look on your Face**

* * *

It was a different experience, being held by biotics without the pretext of restraining. The Normandy had held its hover over the rather arid planet Shepard was tasked to. Not too far away from Feros, all things considered.

Jumping distance, flashbacks of Eden Prime crossed JD and Mai's minds as they peered over to the flat sands below. Kharakon II. Attican-bordering planet. Recently discovered in the last few months by some miraculous trend of the Alliance Survey Corps finding planets out of nowhere. Fresh water basin on the far side of the planet, but a bit too inhospitable for colonization outright.

Only the most desperate found themselves here.

That's what Mai remembered of this world.

It was the same now.

Shepard remarked a survey beacon went down, last recorded activity was tampering.

_"Why would anyone shut down a survey beacon?" Corporal Loke had been one of the Hitman tasked. Five man team. No more or less by Shepard's insistence. She asked with a hint of annoyance that she was being ordered to go out on something below her._

_Shepard shook her head. "Well it didn't get shut down. We did that. Beacon was running after the tampering." The Commander gestured over her shoulder to some vague something. "Batarians out this way try to hack into our beacons to jack into the Alliance info net. Unlikely, but if that's the case we gotta go chase 'em off."_

So with that Mai had been slowly, slowly been let down the two dozen or so feet onto the ground. Kaiden's biotics had felt more as if they were hoisting her by her armor as opposed to her entire being, stopping her on the way down from gaining too much momentum and putting a crater.

Both of Kaiden's hands had been up as if conducting the swell of an orchestra on the lip of the Normandy's well deck, a procession of Marines and crew members looking, taking bets to see if Mai could be hefted like that by Kaiden.

"If I tickle ya right now, Ell-Tee," Ashley had almost threatened to do so to Kaiden as he concentrated roughly on keeping Mai up. "What would happen?"

Kaiden grit his teeth. "You get to clean up Chief Gul's body."

JD grimaced, hoping it didn't come down to it as the last few feet Kaiden had let go, letting Mai drop on her own, hitting ground. Swiftly she had turned around, giving thumbs up to a crowd of half-disappointed Hitmen and half-slightly richer examples. Kaiden turned to the shock trooper. "You're up Durante."

Peering down, it was a jump that, if he did manually, he probably would've been able to do anyway. Might bruise, might break something, but he could do it. God knows he had dislocated many a bone during his drops in another life. With Mai it had been different, Kaiden much more hands-on with her as he had picked up her entire form and dipped her down. With JD he could afford to be a little more off light on the touch.

There was a certain anxiousness that JD had, now, looking out from the Normandy to a relatively blue sky, but it was always the inbetween of mission and deployment that got him on edge, no matter how marginal it had been.

"Take a jump. I got ya."

Those who were looking were impressed by how easy JD had taken to the fall. Some might've taken it as simply JD outright trusting the biotic, however, it was much simpler than that. JD was not afraid of falling. Tali's eyes had bugged out as, for a split-second, it seemed that Kaiden would not hold onto the Shock Trooper, but JD found the pressure beneath his feet, softening and slowing his fall until he had hit ground painlessly next to Mai.

He had taken it as casually as he could, shouldering his gun, but finding nothing but a Spartan standing at ease in front of him.

"Hey." He had said softly. He would take their alone time, small as it was.

She returned a gentle nod back.

"Ah, I don't like this." The Hitman known as Doc had grimaced, sweat on his bald head shining as Kaiden simply pushed him for his troubles, going down chest first as he too was also carried down. Loke had more grace as she shared a reassuring nod to Tali. The two had become friends, oddly enough. So she had stepped off as if going into a pool, feeling Kaiden grab her and bring her down to earth simply. All that was left had been Tali, however she had hidden none of her apprehensions as she realized she was next, a slight jitter in her knees as she peered over the lip, hands on her legs.

"_Keelah." _It left her lips as a curse as her voice broke. "Ah uh, forgive me. I'm not used to biotics and, heights, and uh, ahhh-" For all her recent training and drills, courage over the base fears of intelligent creatures had been something she hadn't mastered yet. The fear of falling was as natural a fear as they came. At least in the Mako she could pretend nothing of the sort was happening.

"Hey, hurry it up, the Normandy doesn't like hovering." Joker whined over the intercom, and even Kaiden had an annoyed look on his brow. In reality he could've probably just picked her up without her consent, but there was a process to this. Ashley had walked behind her, frightening Tali almost, but the Marine kept her distance.

"It's not that bad. The Lieutenant here just did it with Chief Gul, of all people, I'm sure he can handle a little thing like you." Ashley had chided on casually, but Tali didn't have any of it as she tried to step forward onto nothing again, but reeled back.

Looking up from the ground, JD had immediately pegged it. He had stepped besides Mai, tapping her arm as she instinctively looked at his hands: index finger hooking. Private comms.

"You've dropped before, right?" _Dropped. _A particular word for something that was as violent as an ODST deployment. She nodded. "Any training?" She shook her head.

JD remembered another rookie, during one of his deployments. ODSTs were never given training drops. Trust in the equipment was hard coded into each recruit in training, but even then, when the pods were swung out from their bays and nothing but a hundred-mile drop was beneath them? Some had thought otherwise. The rookie had tried to pound his way out of the pod moments before the drop, forgetting that any violent force impulse from the inside might've derailed his pod's ejection. He disintegrated on the way down, poor bastard screaming all the while. JD only remembered that dreadful sound as Tali struggled to take that magic step over.

"Come on, girl, you've been shot at already, ain't much more scarier things than that." Doc had rumbled to himself as both he and Loke also looked up.

Inches, Tali kept creeping toward the lip, and inches she would reel back. She had almost hopped when she felt a grab her arm, and pull her back. She was going to curse in extreme Quarian at whoever did it, but she only found the look of Shepard herself and her entrancing gaze.

"You good, Tali?" Shepard cocked her head, red bangs slightly swaying.

She blinked a few times behind her visor as she felt the electrifying touch of Shepard through her suit. "Ye- Yeah. I'm just getting my nerves together."

"I feel you." Shepard let go of her, coming to the edge of the Normandy's bay and, almost surprisingly, sitting down and throwing her legs over the edge, sitting. "Don't trust my good Lieutenant yet?" Shepard motioned her shoulders at Kaiden, the man standing down, knowing that this was one of her bits. It was a nice and reassuring bit, but a bit nonetheless. In the short time he had worked with her he had known of Shepard's particular motivation style throughout the crew: something so personal it was intimate almost.

"No. No. It's not that. Lieutenant Alenko is more than capable. I just saw him do the same to them." Tali gestured down at the waiting fireteam. "It's just, well, hard to beat back instincts."

Shepard peered down herself, wondering if she was still in practice enough to call forth her own powers and soften her landing. She was half-tempted to try, but she was due back on the bridge to deal with another fireteam being sent out as this one did its mission.

"You particular scared of falling?" Shepard asked. Tali shook her head almost immediately.

"I mean. Heights aren't really a thing on the Flotilla. I'm just unused to it. Even the Citadel gave me some vertigo."

Shepard had drawn her legs back up, almost hugging them as she spoke out, not necessarily at Tali, but she had been drawn in, all the same. "I've seen you training, all this time during your free shifts. That make you feel better about taking on the Geth?"

"Feel better?" Tali said slowly.

Shepard stared out as she stood up again, drawing back from the edge. "Can't really train for that feeling: contact with the enemy. You can train about what you'd do, about the motions of the fight, but there's no way in hell we can actually train for it. Same way we can't train for things like this," her hand motioned out the bay. "But despite that, you train anyway, because it does make you feel better, does it?"

Why did Tali become the way she had been, with them? Perhaps it had been so simple as seeing what another woman, trapped in a suit, could do. Inspiration by way of proximity, poisonous, toxic, seeped in through the skin that had never felt fresh air.

She nodded once. "Right…" Again, she felt Shepard's hand on her shoulder, so light, and yet on fire. It was no secret that the Quarian people as a whole had been touched starve inwardly, and outwardly, the population of the galaxy had given them that berth of xenophobia. Shepard held no such barriers.

With a contact so gingerly, she had reassured her. "You've done this time and time again in the Mako. Ain't no sweat."

Imbued with her strength, transmitted apparently by touch, Tali found her footing as she closed her eyes and took the step forward and everyone got ready. A yelp came from her throat as she felt no footing beneath herself, but then the reassuring hold of the ghostly grip.

It was Kaiden, mostly, but there had been more as Shepard sucked in her breath and felt, within herself, the powers she had been blessed with, reaching out with one hand and steadying Tali on her way down.

When she touched down, Shepard's warm smile didn't leave her, a satisfied look coming over her as she turned away and the well deck door closed.

Garrus and Liara had been left watching, their proximity natural, if only because of their status as aliens. As the rest of the crowd dissipated and the flew to the next point of interest in system, they remained, their gaze remaining on Shepard.

"So does the whole pep talk thing you do come with Alliance training or…?" She could tell if Garrus had been sarcastic with her as Liara glanced at him, the Turian moving a talon behind his head to scratch.

Liara had noticed something however in that whole display, seeing the unseen aura that only biotics could feel through their hidden sense, ghosting around Shepard's hand.

"You don't use your Biotics often, do you Shepard?" She asked.

Shepard had known what she saw: how particularly unrefined her own Biotics use form had been compared to Kaiden in that vague way. She simply licked her lips and shrugged. "Preference, Liara. Preference."

"Preference?"

Shepard had felt the implant slot behind her ear again, the urge to scratch it their. "Ah, it's nothing. I'm just not a fan of this privilege."

* * *

Loke had been one of those rare, fiesty sort. JD knew the type among the ODSTs. Raring for battle; only in the thrill of combat did they truly feel alive and worth something. He might've been the same way if Persei had gone better. His first time engaging Covenant had been full of sound and fury, signifying victory as an Elite was gunned down in the jungles by his Battle Rifle. A simple existence to be sure, but it had filled him with satisfaction. Only the horror of surviving a Glassing righted him.

Corporal Loke would not have that sobering experience. It would not be possible in this galaxy it felt. Still she was a dangerous sort altogether. She didn't wear a helmet, relying on kinetic barriers by herself, letting her barely regulation-kept hair out, a purple keffiyeh around her neck contending with the metal rim of her armor.

Cute, maybe, if it hadn't been for the fact she had seen her battles, got a curve on her brow that spoke to her fierceness. That was JD's read of her as she glanced him and Mai a look.

"Which one of you is ranking, anyway?" She asked. JD tilted his helmet at Mai, and she nodded to affirm. A sour look came and past her face, but it was non-consequential. "Fine."

"Ease up Loke," Doc had readjusted the way his rifle was held by him, visually sweeping the LZ. "Emerson ain't here. You know how Ryder was always… overly particular about his threat assessments."

Loke had given a glance at JD again, thinking over Doc's words. Hitman's last order from Ryder had been to watch over Shepard and her two VIPs, but as things turned out, they didn't seem eminently a threat to her. They were subservient if anything. That and JD had seemed relatively normal, if not just normal outright. Quiet, yes, disturbed with nightmares, but then again what SOF operator hadn't had their own horrors in their head. She knew she had her own.

Mai had stood as a statue, within her helmet, tuning them all out as she concentrated on the mission at hand. These missions, if any of her ONI-handlers were present, might've been liable to say that these missions were wasted on a Spartan. She had no preference, so she would do it however. It wasn't as if she hadn't been in this situation before. Innies often got handsy with UNSC Intel assets.

Doing it with a fireteam however?

"I'll scout ahead."

Mai had said fast. Faster she had moved off toward the direction of the beacon. They had landed an hour and a half-ruck out. For Mai that had meant maybe forty minutes. JD didn't have quite the heart to stop her as she had marched off without a word, her grey armor a sore thumb in the relatively clear day.

That arid planet had a breathable atmosphere at least, Doc taking off his helmet and hooking it to his belt.

The Normandy was already a faraway blip as they looked out to it, Mai's rather impressive tread already putting her quite a bit away as the fireteam settled from the kicked-up dust. The rest of the fireteam had stayed in place, waiting on JD's go, of all things. He had waited for her IFF-tag to peter out, the peculiarities of their HUD software still yet to be toyed with.

_"You mentioned, back when we first met," JD had started one day. "You knew your way around mechanical stuff?"_

_"A bit."_

_"How about software?"_

She had blanked for a moment, uncomfortable with admitting she hadn't, and that was that.

"You know I've never seen classified medical records like her." Doc had stated as she became a blip in the distance, JD twisting his head at him in a question. "No, ain't like that. Just was wondering if she needed supplements like the Biotics onboard." Doc had, unsurprisingly, taken double-duty with helping Chakwas in the Med-Bay, so he had access to those records.

JD shook his head once, shifting his shoulders, ushering them to follow, only barely noticing Tali had used a slung shotgun this deployment. Not exactly the prime environment, but slugged ammunition, especially out of a Krogan shotgun, had seemed, in theory, usable. He had an old squad lead who had sworn his life on his M90 shotgun and the six different shells he kept handy. Surprisingly, as morbidly as it had been to JD, he had been one of the few ODST who he had served with to still be alive.

There was a slight weightlessness in their steps; this particular planet's gravity not 1:1 to what they were used to. If any of them had taken a hop there would've been some fun in it: any sand that had been cooked up floated a bit further than expected, as if in slow motion.

"You're up to snuff though, medical record wise, especially that amp in the back of your head." The neural lace. He had seen Mai's own, in glances and in low light, whenever he had caught the back of her head. It wasn't noticeable to most, only the stark reminder that he had his own did it lead him to wonder what her own looked like. While his had been no more than a slit at the bottom of his skull, hers had been more elaborate, albeit covered up by her hair. It was like the cover of processing units, silver, carving out an unnatural, square like piece of her head and over it like a chip, recessed.

He remembered what it was for, when she came clean about the Spartans to him, the first weeks they had been together. For all of her enhancements and modifications, this had been the one most illegal, most reprehensible in that galaxy.

JD wondered if Tali would vomit if told what it had been.

Ryder's men and women would've understood.

They walked in a messy line, wide, following the sandy footsteps of Mai, she already gone.

"Don't talk much, do ya Chief?" They had been walking for a while in silence before Loke had commented finally, fed up of not even conversation. He shook his head at her as an answer, she not expecting any less than that. "Figures."

"He's in the rucking zone, Loke. And so was I." Zoning out while marching had been a way to pass time, if anything. "Besides he makes great conversation, right Tali?"

The Quarian seemed a little spooked when she was drawn into the conversation, but she did. "I mean, uh, not really." That had gotten a reaction out of him at least, taking his hand and raising it up at her, head tilted. "Well to be fair Garrus likes hearing himself talk, so we usually just let him go on, during lunch."

"Ah, right, Vakarian. He don't talk to us none." Doc remembered that a Turian, of all things, had been on the ship still and now. He didn't hang out in the Well Deck often enough to see him.

"Well it doesn't help you talk about killing Turian mercs so loudly." Tali's chastising had only been met with a laugh between the two Hitmen, and she really wish it hadn't been. "He's nice, if you get to know him. Even Wrex. I turned out okay, didn't I?"

By consequence of Tali training so much with the Marines, she had become the most normalized, even beyond Gul and Durante. Though there were always justifications. "Well you're our little own NBK, Tali, killing Synthetics out of the goodness of your heart." Loke had only come back to give Tali noogies, at least best she could, rubbing her knuckle on her visor as she waved her off. "You're the ship's favorite. Commander Shepard gets all maternal about you if anything."

Indeed, even Shepard had been softer on Tali than most, but it mostly just stemmed from the fact that she had been, starkly, barely in her twenties.

"Well I think that's just the Commander. Compared to Ryder, I've personally never had it any better." Doc had spoken, exasperated if anything. Everyone there knew what he was saying however.

For 45 people on her ship, Shepard had taken the effort to talk to, and touch base with, every single one. Of course, she gave preference to the aliens, those not familiar with their operations, but generally Shepard had been the human resources holy grail that everyone there didn't know they wanted.

She had "rounds", as the crew had pegged now, always expecting Shepard to swing by at some point during a shift. The trap of having the Normandy that small comparatively, pleasantries, and even certain ranking, hierarchal formalities, just were tossed asides. She would actually talk to her crew, beyond their mission, their roles.

It was liberating at some point when Shepard would join a debate held on the deck, and subsequently join the shouting match (that particular example being whether or not the breakfast MREs were the best of the entire inventory).

"Feels like I'm back at college, somedays on this ship." Loke admitted.

"Well, I'd rather think about that then all this Reaper bullshit the Commander is whispering about with Liara." Doc fired back.

Loke rolled her eyes, adjusting her scarf as some sand got kicked up by a gust of wind. "As if Liara hasn't talked to Commander Ryder about it before."

"The Reapers are a legitimate threat." JD had finally opened his mouth. The idea of extinction level threats seemed to strike a chord with him for reasons that went far beyond his permission to express. Though there was a stark reality to Shepard's visions, talked in hushed whispers by the crew behind her back in doubt, that Mai and himself had their own personal horrors about. One that they shared with Alliance Admiralty that had realized that Shepard's visions were confirmed within themselves.

For in her nightmares of the Reapers, so did come the nightmare of something true: the repressed memories Mai held within herself. Something that _did _happen.

The Reapers were real, but to explain would to open a can of worms. Still the alternative at the moment had been this, because everyone was still processing it: The Apocalypse was real. The Apocalypse was coming. The Apocalypse was one of many secrets the Alliance had been keeping.

"Yeah Chief?" Loke chided. "Don't think Shep's gone cuckoo?"

Perhaps, he thought to himself, but he shook his head. "She doesn't seem the type to lie."

There was a hostile, snarky chuckle to that from Loke. "You'd know about that business, wouldn't ya? Lying and stuff?"

He'd be more annoyed, more ticked off at Loke's, and Hitman's open disrespect of them if it hadn't been for the fact he had been on the other side of that paradigm. The ODSTs and Spartans had this same relationship, and he understood, he thought, before he met Mai. Even if he had never met a Spartan, and if he didn't care about it, he understood why some of his ODST squadmates would keep that bravado to them. So he let Loke keep it.

"Can't lie if I don't say much, Corporal." Referring to people by rank, it felt weird to him, in this fashion. He had heard Tali huff amused. "Besides, I ain't that much of a spook. I'm just the guy who pulls out people who don't exist."

That was his cover story anyway: SAR for SOF who had gotten up to their neck in shit in places that they shouldn't be.

"I think Garrus would've tagged you on it anyway, JD." It was nice, hearing Tali so casual, holding a shotgun. It was also nice to hear that banter backing him up. "With him being a cop, and all."

"What would I lie about?" It surprised JD to hear himself speak with a gruff to his voice. He sounded like his father. "The fact I think shitty coffee tastes good?"

"You make the case for it, seeing as Chief Gul has taken to it, apparently."

"Well she takes after me anyway." JD had wanted to shut his own mouth the second those words left him. Why he had wanted to say that, and did say it, was beyond him. Though it was true; was he not offering himself as a platform for Mai to bounce off of? In learning, and in knowing? In feeling even? Thinking back to her own possessiveness of him, or, at least, aspects of him, there was something to think of himself to her then too. There was a possessiveness he had declared, then and there of her.

"Do you guys, like, like each other?" Their feet had been moving on their own, but Loke's question had almost caused him to stumble.

Loke didn't see JD grimace behind his helmet as the two slid down the slope on their asses, shifting the sands. He used the short slide down to form some sort of answer. He didn't want to even think about what Loke meant with that, still, she wasn't going to let it go as he had righted himself at the bottom of the dune, slapping his own ass and getting the sand off of it. "How do you mean?"

"Look. I've served with Doc here about, four years now, right?"

"Probably?" The older man affirmed.

"And I don't even like him." Doc had barely seemed hurt by it, but it was probably said in jest based Loke's shake of her head. "But the thing is, you Black Ops people, you must have the choice, right? Even with Captain Anderson's requisitions and requests, you guys seemed like a packaged pair."

Yes. They were.

"And…?"

"That for a reason?"

JD ran the actual answer in his head. _Because we're both extradimensional refugees and our separation means that one would be violently at risk of committing a lonewolf genocidal campaign at behest of her new masters and the other would be completely alone in the universe._

He used another answer: "We synergize well."

No one had noticed, but Tali had gone reflective, her eyes glazing over as she thought about the topic of conversation.

Loke went on. "Well, we're all professional here, but we can still act beyond that capacity while still remaining professional."

Hitman had been a family. Stories that predated the Normandy, Shepard, and their entirely new situation had been within them, and even Shepard respected that. For her prying nature, there was something organic in Hitman that she knew she would never be a part of. Something that Ashley had failed to see, with how she tried to gum up with them somedays.

"Are you guys fucking?" To hear the older man, Doc, say that, it had surprised all of them. Loke bit back a laugh that had gotten halfway out. "Like I gotta know for medical purposes, I swear. I just found out like, four people on the Normandy are sexually active and I've gotta get the proper things for it requisitioned."

"What? No." JD had seemed almost disgusted by the sudden proposition. "Chief Gul she's a… Reserved." Conservative? He didn't want to imply that of her nature, but it wasn't as if she had one at present. She never had that opportunity, out of all things, to explore that particular part of Human nature. "Besides I _have_ someone else."

He almost trembled, stumbled, saying those words. Not putting Dawn in the past-tense. Surely Humanity, at least, had held Reach, right? After what they did, surely, they must've bought Humanity a few months. Dawn must've still been alive. He prayed for that at that second.

Tali had recoiled a bit out of sight of everyone. Hadn't she just backed up JD on not being a liar?

"Ah, oh." Doc and Loke had shut up at that. Loke still pushed on though, albeit reeled back. "You guys still seem close though. Closer than people _are, _usually."

Their relationship was professional first. _It had to be_. It felt wrong to think of a relationship with Mai any further than that, knowing what she was: A Spartan. And yet, distantly, he thought wouldn't that be a reason to think of her much kindlier? To be kind to her and nice and warm in a way she was deprived of. In a way he knew? If he did, if she reacted… Was it not an aspect of him, as a socialized, normal man, taking advantage of her?

"Well-" JD started to explain part of that, but he had been stopped. Stopped by Tali's voice of all things.

"I know you two are close. Even if you won't say." The entire group had turned to Tali at that moment, pausing, and with that attention she had figured to go all the way, her three fingers anxiously tapping Wrex's shotgun for a moment. "I've been meaning to ask…" Tali was slow to start, but there was determination in her voice: a casualness now brought on by being with Marines nowadays. "Chief Gul. She's been in that armor all her life, hasn't she?"

JD tilted his head and Quarian knew he had asked a question. When she answered however, that's when a simple fact of Tali's life was made known, and made apparent. Of anyone there who would know what it was like to be in a suit their entire life.

"How can you tell?" JD asked back. He answered it inside his head the second the question left his mouth. The difference had been the very thing he was wearing right now, in the broad sense.

Tali touched upon her visor for a moment, fingertips tapping it once. "I don't know if I can read Human faces as well I can read Quarian, but the way she emotes herself through her face, the way her eyes move, it reminds me of Quarians without families: Those that would not show their face, truly, to anyone for perhaps decades on end."

They were all hyper aware now of this truth: No one on the Normandy had known what Tali's face looked like. Perhaps, under certain lighting, the hint of a humanoid nose would poke out from the polarized visor she had; the burn of her luminescent eyes, however nothing past that. Her face was her helmet's visor, and everyone on the Normandy had taken it at that.

"She kinda has a stone face, Tali. Resting bitch face, if anything." Loke gestured to her own face, making the point, Tali nodding.

"I thought so too, at first, but there were the little things that clued me into it."

"Like what, pray tell?" Doc had been intrigued, as were all of them.

Wrex's shotgun rested at her hip, courtesy of the sling as Tali moved her own hands again back to her visor, gesturing. "She stares a lot, for one. Not like, looking kind of staring, but just staring. Uncomfortably so. With a helmet on it'd be easy to conceal the fact you might or might not be looking at something, but without one on it's very obvious."

"Hey why don't you become a cop? Body language reading is a skill." Doc had mused, but Tali waved him off before squaring her vision with JD.

"She's very aware of it, I've noticed, when it comes to you JD." Without the regimen of military life, to hear someone else other than Mai nowadays call him his preferred name had been pausing for him, but Tali had no reservations. They had been friendly now, if anything. If not Mai, he often had lunch with her or Garrus. "She treats you.. hmm." Tali tried to find the word for it, remembering her first delving into that messy situation known as feelings and matters of affection. Perhaps her particular affinity for engineering came from her need to find quiet spots on the Rayya to explore more particular parts of herself (and other people) in peace. Still, in that messy zone, she drew an answer that wouldn't outright humiliate her new friends (Yes, she had decided, JD had become a friend). "She is nervous around you, and yet respectful."

"Nervous?" JD had said the word aloud.

The answer Tali gave had been the same answer she had wrestled herself when she first dealt with feelings of the heart. "There are just things about you, I think, that she doesn't know what to do about."

* * *

Mai had gotten far enough away from the fireteam that JD's IFF tag had disappeared. Her first true time alone since Reach it felt like. Not that she particularly minded sharing her solitude with JD, but it was just a state of fact that this was her first time back in what had been the element she existed in for years. This was the normal she had left behind.

The silence that had once defined many a mission for her, it returned, and if she had concentrated hard enough, ignored the unfamiliar weapon in her hand, the stars in the sky, or mission, she was back in her old life. She was back hunting Insurrectionists or Covenant alone, with nothing but a planet between them.

This was as normal as she had felt in a long time, and so she had rolled with it, selfish as it was to move off from JD and the rest of the fireteam. Intel on the ground didn't say much for danger anyhow. If anything, it would just be, Shepard had recounted a mission from her earlier years as part of a Marine QRF Officer, space monkeys taking apart some components.

Mai had only thought of the one time she had fought the local fauna before Reach, and to be fair the Insurrectionists had weaponized them. On Reach the Guta's, the troll-like behemoths she encountered uncovering the Solace's stealth generator, had been a shakeup.

She remembered the last time she was here on that planet in her universe, a sniper rifle on her back and a carbine in her arms: tasked with taking out an Insurrectionist cruiser that had been using the planet as a place to hide from UNSC patrols. She was to lay in wait and take them out when they landed.

She did.

She had a few kills on ships to her name, but this one had been a bit more personal than anyone would imagine. Personal meaning she getting onto the bridge and personally splattering the crew on every inch of the walls.

That was on the other side of the planet however. Here she had been met with nothing but sand dunes and distant mountains, the visage of some greenery out in the distance breaking up the monotony of her ruck.

The ebbs and bows of sand dunes had kept her climbing and descending, however eventually the sand had turned into nothing more than arid dirt as she approached the site of the beacon. It was only after the crest of one last sand dune however, she going onto her stomach instinctively, crawling up it. Not even months after Reach and she had been again doing this sort of stuff on behalf of another Humanity. Having sniping support from another Spartan had been nice, she admitted. Jun had reminded her of the Headhunters made in her image, competent, clandestine; lacking the bombast of the Spartan-IIs. All she knew was that it would've been nice to have a full blown sniper rifle as she found the edge of the crest, peering over and down.

Alliance Survey beacons were, simply, nothing more than satellites that were instead embedded into the Earth, using its sensors to scan the planet wherever they would fall. Cheap, not entirely the most accurate solution, but a good way to get a head on the general statistics of a planet. Hundreds of these beacons had been sent out recently, and Mai wasn't surprised. She was the reason why a metal probe, blocky, almost as if a jet engine, had been wedged half way into the dirt, erect. She wasn't the reason why a Kodiak had been parked right next to it, a tarp bridging its roof and connecting to the upper portions of the beacon making an impromptu shelter. Through the magnified optic of her rifle she saw thick cabling connected to various points of the beacon, all leading back into the Kodiak. Civilian-trim as far as she could peg; not the blue of the Alliance.

Movement. She peered further into her optic: a white garbed figure. Human-shaped. Perhaps Human outright. Moving out of the shadows the figure had adjusted some of said cabling before retreating back into the shade. Mai didn't see a weapon, and they didn't look dangerous outright, but what they were doing had been of course of note.

Shepard had outlined ROE, on missions like this, shortly after the Normandy left the Citadel.

_"To engage, you must be engaged."_

Rules of engagement. To think she had fallen under one after all these years. Mai had shaken her head internally. The Covenant and the Insurrection had no niceties… but then again, it wasn't her prerogative to go against orders, even if it was so easy to just aim at the figures head through the tarp and then pull.

Killing was easy.

Everything else? Well she wasn't trained for it.

She glanced back behind herself, seeing no trace of the rest of the fireteam.

Of course, she could've radioed in. She should've, but she was always good alone. Nothing had changed. It wasn't as if she was going to kill in cold blood anyway, she thumbing the switching behind one of her fingers and seeing her own form dissipate like the vision distortions in the distance due to the heat.

If one had any way to track the Spartan, it would've been from the way she left her tracks, the movement of the rocks as she walked her way down the slope to the level of the beacon. Not rushing, not running, but particularly aware of the foundation of her steps, trying to not make any noise as she approached.

The active camouflage grafted onto her armor had been one of many systems reverse engineered from the Covenant, but as for maintenance on it? It was a bit beyond her. Still, for as long as it worked, she would've used it. Just like now; just as how she had rounded the beacon and the attached shuttle and visually cleared the site, only to see that lone, white garbed figure sitting in a camping chair and lazily typing into a console. What view she did have into the open Kodiak spoke to someone who had made it their home.

The active camouflage let her in close, circling the site once or twice, that figure not moving as they typed away. The skin of her fingertips had shown, tanned, but otherwise telling. They were human. Their entire body had been covered in white garb, probably to shield from the sun. It was almost as if they were camping out here, the only threat at it all it looked like had been the older rifle laying by the side of the shuttle. A Mattock; a hunting rifle used by civilian frontier people.

Nothing there looked military as far as Mai could tell, and she had been working on turning her near encyclopedic knowledge of militaria to current relevance.

What that meant simply was…

Mai had purposefully kicked up some rocks, and the figure had twisted as if struck by lightning, trying to pivot in their chair, only for it to tip over, disheveling the wrap around their head.

A woman. Caucasian. Blonde. Early 30s perhaps. In a heap of trouble by Mai's account as she turned off her camo. There was no bolt on her gun to slap, no foley to intimidate with. She wasn't used to this part: not opening fire. Still, she did what she thought would be pertinent. "Identify yourself."

At gunpoint, on the ground and at her side, the woman had whimpered as she twisted about trying to find the source of that voice, only to settle on the grey metal monster that approached her with a gun. "Don't shoot!"

Not her name. "Identify." Had put more stone in her voice as she stood yards away, the tip of the shade casting itself over her as she finally got a glance at the console she was using: telemetry data perhaps.

"Kelsie! Kelsie Oruma."

It was something, glancing at the whole affair, the cables and shuttle attached to the beacon. "This is Alliance property." All this had been new ground for Mai to break, a part of her wishing she did wait for the rest of the team. Still, there wasn't any need to put a round into her.

Yet.

The woman was skittish as she set down her hood onto her shoulders. She seemed thin, tanned, of course, given the location, but she didn't seem… well. Well, not in the health sense, in regards to any illness or such, but rather she had seen better times. She was dirty, and finally, Mai had pegged, impoverished. She rubbed her hands over each other as she took in Mai's words, eyes darting left and right, trying to find something; an excuse.

"I'm- I'm sorry." She eeked out, biting her lower lip.

Mai had only let her gun down now, but it had hardly eased off any of the tension there. "What are you doing?" Mai tipped her head up at her. She had tried moving back to close the console, but Mai twitched her gun up again. There were other things on the table asides from the console: a cup of water, a data pad, a framed picture of-

Mai didn't look. She couldn't. She wasn't supposed to make that mistake.

"I'm a hacker. Former Alliance Colonial. It's, well, complicated." Kelsie gestured to the console, holding her hands again.

"Again. What are you doing?" Mai spoke in such plain tones, defined only by the growl behind it, she didn't seem human. It was like talking to a VI. "I could kill you."

Well that was true with just about anyone, but of course Mai meant it different than how she had wanted. Even she caught that mistake as the woman whimpered. "I'm just trying to find survey telemetry. I don't know who hired me, but private corps like to get ahead of the pack when the Alliance finally allows colonization, it's not the first time I've been asked something like this."

Oil. This planet had oil. For the UNSC, oil had been only a tertiary energy resource, but for the Insurrection, without the widespread infrastructure to keep fusion reactors always running, Oil had been something worth digging for to power, at least, colonies to reserve the fusion reactors for the ships.

"Who hired you?"

"I- I don't know. I received the assignment and export address remotely. Could be anyone, from the Shadow Broker to the Blue Sons, ExoGeni, or hell, even those Collectors I keep hearing stories about." Not a lot of loyalty, but then again mercenaries being paid to hang out like this weren't always cut throat. Then again calling this woman a mercenary seemed… off. Still, she was doing something illegal. "I'm harmless. I swear. Are you Alliance?"

Mai had nodded once. Kelsie had looked around, to be met alone by a single soldier, it seemed odd. "Are you a VI? Some sort of synth?"

Mai shook her head, thumbing the side of her helmet, depolarizing, her eyes seen behind it for a split second before it went back. "Look, I mean, I told you I'm not really doing anything bad here. No one's getting hurt, just, some, I dunno corporate espionage or something like that. If you could maybe, let this slide I can-"

"No."

How many times had Insurrectionist mercenaries begged her for their lives by paying her off? What did money mean anything to her?

"Come on! You Marines usually take it once I show you the data. It's completely harmless! And the Alliance is sending hundreds of these beacons out recently. Just one won't kill anyone."

Mai twitched. To think of UNSC Marines being swayed. It annoyed her.

"You need to stop what you're doing. **Now.**"

Kelsie's eyes had dropped, realizing that who she was dealing with hadn't been normal. The enormity of Mai had only just registered as she approached, fully into the shadows, all of the almost seven feet of her brought to bear in a metal chassis that spoke of warfare. When she glanced at her rifle by the shuttle Mai had only taken one step further. She was a giant, choking the woman out by presence alone.

"Are you… taking me in?"

Another one of Shepard's ROE implications: Kaiden had asked one day, after an op regarding pirates. They had a survivor. Shepard had been on the fireteam that day.

She ran them off, disarming him. _"Not enough room on the Normandy to maintain a brig. This is the next best thing."_

_"How about executing them?" Wrex sniffed, the conversation in the well deck._

_Shepard shook her head disappointed that he even asked. "We're not monsters."_

Mai played by her rules for now.

"Pack up. Or I start breaking stuff. Breaking **you**."

"You're serious?" It was certainly an odd exchange. One that implied Alliance types never went this far to deal with something that seemed so minor in the grand scheme of things, but Mai wasn't about appropriate reactions. In Mai's experience, the amount of people prepared for death when it actually came for them, she could count on her hand. She would know; she was death more often than not. Here, death came for Kelsie Oruma for something that wasn't much more than an infraction, and death looked like a cruelty befit from the Devil. A sinner in her hand; fit not to just be turned over, but rather crushed. There was no playing games here.

What did you die for? What did you live for? Questions that some would ask themselves when they finally peered over that line.

"I have nothing else in this world. You must know how jobs are, this far out…" Kelsie started, a sincerity in her voice she didn't quite know where it came from. "I have a child to feed, off world. And, and, this is all the work I can find."

Mai responded all too naturally. "It's a security threat. We don't know who you're selling this data too."

"Please, just understand. Wait! Here, let me show you a picture of-" She went for the picture frame, but Mai had belted out.

**"Stop." **Mai's voice was low, dropping like concrete as the young woman reeled back. "I'm not letting you stay."

"What would you do for your daughter? Please."

It wasn't often that Mai remembered that she had been a woman. Ideas of her self-identity, of gender, her name even, who she had been before a Spartan, they were on the fringes of her memory and mind. She kept them there, on purpose, not quite gone, but not quite there. It was a liability to even explore them. Though like battle and gunfire, she was forced to see them, somedays.

Speaking to a maternal instinct, something shared between them inherently as women.

"I don't even know who you are." Mai growled.

There was a choice here. Red and Blue. Order and Chaos. Moral choices. But she wasn't a woman who made choices. She was the object by which choices were carried out. It was easier that way.

Kelsie stood there, anger and frustration coming over her face as her white garb fluttered in the faint gusts. Maybe it was easier for her to just be hit, to be broken, to be killed. At least she didn't have to know they had failed their child.

Failing their child. Was that what happened to herself? Mai felt the burn of her necklace beneath her suit for the first time in ages, pausing her, pausing them all until it became unbearable.

"I won't ask you again. **Go.**" The steel in her voice, the way she had been faceless behind her helmet, they did nothing to protect her from this:

"Damn you, woman. _Damn you_."

Mai had slightly adjusted her rifle up, but she had stormed off, the croak in her voice showing tears she could not hide. How much work had been cut off because of her arrival?

It hadn't been a particular arduous or long task: seeing her dismantle the mini-site she had made for herself, gathering cables into the shuttle as she refused to even look at Mai. It didn't take more than ten minutes, messily.

She grabbed her rifle by its carry handle, pausing, but Mai had been looking at her already. There was no way she could do something, even if she wanted. With that finality the rifle was just tossed into the shuttle unceremoniously. It had kicked up dust seconds later, its thrusters activating, but Mai had been undeterred as her shields, for a moment, kicked in as dust and pebbles were thrown toward her and the shuttle scooting away, out into the blue sky.

* * *

They had slipped down the slope down to the beacon shortly after, all too aware that they had seen a shuttle take off from it.

"Status?" JD had asked, not over radio, but as he approached her, the rest of the fireteam idly securing a sector, seeing the imprints left behind by someone that had set up.

"Some hacker trying to grift data. Ran her off."

Loke and Doc shared a look, familiar with the situation.

JD had nodded in response. He had meant to gesture to Tali, but it wouldn't probably be for the best for a Quarian to take a look at Alliance meta-data. "Corporal Loke. I hear you know a thing or two about this stuff."

She got the implication, holstering her rifle behind her back and interfacing with the beacon in short order. Tali had looked the beacon up and down in short order, setting the shotgun down by her foot as she seemed to pout behind her mask. "I was promised more Geth."

Doc knocked his fist against his armored crotch twice as he took a knee and scanned the surrounding area. The beacon landed in a recessed area, sandy, arid slopes surrounding them. Not exactly the best place to be if fighting popped off.

Loke had tapped in to the beacon, the slight electronic whirring of it starting to heighten. "It's resuming its processes now." She read off her data from the omni-tool. "No damage, far as I can tell."

"Is that it?" Tali wondered aloud about their mission here. A short walk and then flipping a switch.

Loke had hung her head back for a moment, looking up at the sky as she and JD held a gaze. "Should stick around for a hot minute. Make sure whoever it was doesn't circle back." Loke offered, only for JD to nod.

"The hacker?" JD turned to Mai.

"Single woman. One gun. Shuttle didn't seem to be armed. Apparently, she was hired from a third-party."

JD had considered for a moment. "We'll stick around until the Normandy calls in, she might be going for backup. At least until the Normandy calls in."

"Oorah."

"Anything more specific we can do?" Tali seemed antsy.

For all her snap, Loke was still a professional. "I can go ahead and see what she was scanning for. Double check the encryption to make sure nothing was left for us, but it'll take a bit."

"We have any other taskings on this planet?" Doc had suggested, he was more than happy to just sit on his ass for a bit. JD and Mai shook their heads once.

"Do it." Mai settled.

"Aye ma'am." Loke hadn't been exactly happy taking those orders, but they were taken as she started the process of her own data scanning.

* * *

If one had approached Usze Tahamee and told him, in his future, that he would be transported across universes, told to make peace with a humanity, have his face marked by a Demon, and then subsequently begin training of a force meant to retake the Sangheili homeworld from an AI menace, he would've killed them for blasphemy. Then again even the Prophets themselves could not be a prophet of that nature, to have predicted how his life turned out.

The largest fleet he had ever seen had been over Altis when he had arrived back from the Citadel. Far larger than even Thel Vadamee's, intended for the human bastion world of Reach. If the Solace, even in its wrecked state, had been the largest space faring object in that galaxy, then the Migrant Fleet had matched that measure by its numbers alone, blotting out the sky itself as they settled over Altis. A glorious sight, given that the Quarians had become allies overnight.

Most of them, that is.

His thoughts as he stood on top of the Solace, its topmost decks normally considered its hull surfaces now smoothed and flattered out, transitioned into landing decks and staging areas nearly the size of all human settlements on Altis itself. The Engineers, if he had interpreted their ever-anomalous chirping correctly, had found pleasure in such interesting circumstances.

He was by no means inexperienced, but that veterancy he did have in the war against the UNSC was by no means directly translatable. Not that it mattered. The Quarians weren't expected to be the ground forces come for the invasion that was in their future, however some Quarian Marines had expected to be on ground when the first boots hit soil. It was only right, Destiny had agreed, as the first Quarian Marine units stepped onto the Solace.

They'd become the first individuals from that galaxy to step foot on the Solace that hadn't been Covenant, and their eyes had been wide with awe once they realized the scope of that downed ship. Once or twice Usze had heard out of the corner of his hearing about Marines recollecting about their Pilgrimages, and how the discovery of something like the Solace would've changed everything.

To be fair, the Solace did change everything.

Usze's foot had blasted against the midsection of a Quarian Marine as the others with their omni-blades tried to surround him. Though this was child's play as he had ignited his own weapon. The burn of an Energy Sword had its nuances. Enough that even an older model such as his own still had a lower power setting. One that wouldn't lacerate the Quarians entirely.

How easy it was for him to dictate the flow of this sparring match: him versus five Marines. They all encircled him, orbiting, as he simply took his steps, watching them each react as they tried to block him in.

Watching from an observing Phantom had been no less than the military commander of the Covenant now: Seylu Karonee. Her cape had floated in its exposure to air, looking down, specifically, on Usze as he had held out his sword, widening the circle as the Quarians were unsure of how to proceed.

"You are weak." Usze spoke to all of them, cruelly, sword cast down. "Why do you not press the attack?"

None had answered as their omni-blades glittered at him, all of them looking at each other. The Quarian combat doctrine was that of self-preservation, and there was enough pointy and sharp bits that Usze had at his own disposal to slick a hole in any of their suits. Usze knew this, answering his own questions.

"Is there not glory in knowing you are so fragile? And yet you fight?!" Usze had recited his teachings of Ascetic warriorhood to them, as a younger Quarian stepped forward, holding his blade across him as he squared up in front of the Elite. "To burn in battle is one of its bounties."

Pain, scars. Elites sought these out, Usze had tried his best to find his. Beneath his armor, on his skin, the pits and the marks of a hundred battles and fights had painted on his skin. Though there was one on him that rose above all others: one that gave him a new name amongst the uninitiated.

"Come on, _**Scarface**_."

Uninspired, perhaps. The first few times he had heard it from Alliance Marines it was an odd translation, perhaps words of scorn. He had been used to such things from Humans. When the Quarians started saying it however he had adjusted his translator and looked up the meaning. A Human cultural artifact to be sure; dishonorable given its origin. Though to those that knew where he had gotten it, it meant something. To be marked by Demons gave Usze weight that the crew put on.

The Quarian Marine yelled at him as the two collided, sword to sword, but Usze had the size advantage, thrashing himself at the Quarian and slamming him to the floor as he immediately swung his sword back, catching a Marine who sought to throw himself on his back.

That was that. No one else would dare take him as they all deactivated their training weapons. Something more pressing had come up as a Phantom landed in one of the clear landing spaces next to the training affair. On that same, massive platform, on the edge, Wraiths had been being used by Quarians, cross-training its operation, sending artillery rounds harmlessly out toward the ocean. Elsewhere Elites and Grunts had been using Mass Effect-based firearms, familiarizing with the galactic standard.

He regarded no Quarian in particular as he broke out of the circle. "Keep sparring."

He heard the mean mutterings of those he left behind, but it was no matter. The Phantom had hovered above the flat surface, those present giving it its berth as training and logistics operations went on. The remaining hangers of the Solace had become a train of shuttles, ferrying personnel and supplies out and in. Food and fuel in, weapons and war out.

The Solace itself had been buzzing, fuel collection efforts going well enough that it could operate on a semi-normal basis. The fact remained the Solace hadn't been whole, and would never be again.

Out from the bottom of a Phantom, a silver-clad Elite had floated down. The Ranger, Ke Nazhumee. New second in command of the Spec Ops forces on the Solace and, perhaps more chiefly, one of the main point of contacts between the Sangheili and the Quarians.

"Commander." Ke had regarded the younger Elite as he approached. How many ranks had, provisionally, Usze gone through at this point? It had made his head spin, and he really paid no heed. His responsibilities were still the same, but if Destiny wanted to be vain, he had no opinion. As of current he held the rank that his mentor did: R'tas Vadumee, Special Operations Commander.

It was a lofty title, befit for an Elite who commanded the Spec Ops throughout the whole Covenant, but here, it did mean that same thing. For as long as they were here, and the reality of it was that it was permanent, this _was _the entire Covenant.

"Am I being summoned?" Usze asked, holstering his sword. Ke had nodded once, only then gesturing with his head at the group of Quarians he had left behind.

"Shall I?"

Usze looked back at them, still recovering. "Weak and feeble creatures… but, they have heart."

"Go easy on them, Usze." There was an unspoken connection between the two Elites, perhaps out of age difference and experience, but there was a relationship there that had been easy, as a bond between warriors was. "Were we all not children on Sanghelios at some point? Weak and feeble?" There was snark and sarcasm in Ke's word.

"Hmph." Was Usze's response as he stepped into the light of the gravity lift and sucked up into the Phantom, Ke replacing him training the Quarians.

When he had entered, his feet finding metal purchase, he had found a mostly empty bay, save for one Elite and her staff.

"Shipmistress." He regarded Karonee all the same, and she had dipped her head once in recognition. Her golden armor had been donned again by her, the mark of a Shipmaster. Her half-cape: the mark of a Fleetmaster.

The outer flaps of the Phantom had been open, exposing the view of the Solace below as the Phantom moved up and out into a holding pattern above, revealing the full enormity of what had been happening on the Solace, and on Altis: the full preparation for a military campaign.

She beckoned Usze forward, and as he had stepped forward, she had let one of her fingers trace the scar on his face. "For a young Elite," she said as she felt it once before letting him back off. "Your scars do not heal easy."

He folded his own claws behind his back. "Admittedly I have not had time to reconcile and recover, Shipmistress."

"Hmph. Were it so easy to believe such a thing exists for us now." Again, with her hand, she had beckoned Usze to stand besides her as they both looked out of the Phantom at the arrangements below, only barely regarding the white dome that had covered the wreckage of the human ship that had done this to them. "This galaxy is telling us that this kind of military preparation is not common."

"For us, it is." He had remembered more and more of Seylu Karonee's service to the Covenant the longer he had served directly under her. She, more than anyone, would know what it took to invade a planet. She was called to Reach after all.

"Reach was to be my greatest triumph. With Supreme Commander Barutamee and Supreme Commander Vadamee." She recounted, looking down on an ostensibly _Human _planet. "But it was not my only. I have glassed worlds, painted the marks of our Faith as if I an artist… My greatest triumph then, shall now be, the reclaiming of our homeworld. A homeworld I did not think I have lost."

Irony, absurdity, surrealism. All were in her words as she said so slowly, seeing Banshees fly in formation beneath them. Brute pilots had been being trained, to shore up reserves. The Brutes had been given more and more responsibility in response to all of the personnel losses. Usze, among many Elites in command positions, had been speaking out against such a radical change, but Destiny had assured them that the Brutes could be charged with such a responsibility.

Apparently, the High Prophet of Regret had also been, recently, confiding in such wishes for the Brutes. The Human idiom: Desperate Measures for Desperate Times. But… the war against the Humans had not been Desperate… had it?

No matter. That war had been behind them. A new one was in front of them against a "Synthetic" menace.

"I am preparing a contingent for the Ardent Prayer's voyage. No more than a month or so. Using patrol routes recognized by the Council so as to find our footing in this galaxy." Usze remained silent, his head barely tilting as she looked into him, ordaining if he knew where this was going. He did. "I would like for you to organize a Spec Ops Lance of your Shadows to accompany us."

Usze clacked his mandibles once, respectfully, a moment of consideration. "Are we expecting to be deployed, Shipmistress?"

She shook her head. "No. But as you know, circumstances are never as they seem."

Fair, he glanced back at the Solace below and the army being trained and prepared. "Shall I draw from the Spec Ops corps exclusively?"

His Spec Ops division on the Solace had yet to be full strength yet, but it was fieldable. Most, if not all, were pre-disposed with training both Quarians and qualified Elites however. There was talk of even allowing Brutes and Hunters into the division which had been, at least in his participation, exclusively Sangheili. As if Brutes could be Special Forces, he thought.

"I'd a measured, but varied Spec Ops Lance. We cannot afford to be… picky. Even the Prophet of Destiny has provided us with his Prelate."

Usze's eyes had widened momentarily. The San'Shyuum, rare amongst their kind, that had been charged with combat. Genetically modified, given artifacts from their Holy Gods with such great, terrible power… It was odd, certainly, that Destiny had one assigned to him on the Solace. The majority of them had been on High Charity, charged with the protection of the High Prophets and Council. He had never seen one in battle, but starkly, Rtas Vadumee had spoken to him once having seen one in combat.

_"Strange, is it that we only use Demon to describe the Human devils." Usze had heard Rtas's non-sequitur as they rested after a sparring match. "Does that disavow those that are among us?"_

"When do we disembark?"

"As soon as we are ready. As fond as I am of the Quarians… this current state of affairs is…" Karonee looked up at space and the cacophony of the Migrant Fleet. "Stuffy."

Stuffy. Scarface. Usze had mused. Having translators for the Human language had been a deadly affair if even they were using them now. All things change, but what that meant especially for him though, it gave him thoughts. Dangerous ones.

"What becomes of us? After?"

"How do you mean, Commander?" There was intrigue in her voice as he asked.

"What becomes of us, without a war?"

Perhaps, deeper than that, what Usze really asked with that had been this:

_What is my purpose?_

Karonee and him had stood there, silent, letting that question sit in the air, unanswered. Unanswered as it had been for thousands of years. Unanswered as it had been in the history that had become of their home reality. Unanswered now, in the new lives given to them.

* * *

"So, basically, think of every cone of vision as a sector. You hold that sector, and try not to overlap. You've gotta rely on your fireteam to cover you, and your fireteam is gonna have to rely on you." Doc had been more than happy to continue Tali's training on planet as they all sat or stood idle, looking out from the beacon for… anything that might come their way, directing her on how to stand and look menacing.

The threat that had been that hacker circling back to either take up shop again or come with reinforcements was real, however even when they did lead Loke had a plan.

"Feed them false data. Lead them down a particular path if someone tries to hack into it so they think they've got it, while also sending a tracker to whatever system their using." Loke explained as she got to it. "I prefer being a pointman, but I majored in systems design in college."

"How'd you end up a Marine?" JD was honestly interested.

"Companies kept outsourcing to Salarians." She shrugged.

So Loke had made her degree in Systems Design and Security worth it that day as they sat, for roughly an hour, and waited for her to layer security onto the beacon. It was a calm that had becoming lulling, if anything, the gentle wind flowing across the sands serene in their own way.

Half an hour in Tali had her stroke of genius for the day, thumbing her omni-tool as a spherical hardlight drone manifested in front of her. It glowed in the bright light even, its hardlight channels hinting toward a combat use. Tali had a more inspired idea as she sat on it.

"Her name's Chatika vas Paus." She referred to the sphere. "Drone I designed as a kid. I've been gradually upgrading her and upping the voltage. My own little attack pet."

"…Can you talk to it?" JD had asked on his side of the perimeter.

She referred to it even as it held her up, running her hands over the light resistance of the hard light. "No…?"

It had taken a moment to think that perhaps a "VI" companion for a Quarian might've been a dangerous taboo.

He himself always wanted a pet, but keeping it contained in their apartment on Luna seemed cruel.

That and dogs never took to low gravity well.

"Hey, Tali." Loke had sat cross-legged in front of the beacon continuing to work, focusing on an internal panel and her omni. The Quarian looked back, "For your Pilgrimage, would data from something like this make the cut?"

She stared at the beacon, wondering that very question, the light in her respirator making half-blinks, as if she had been saying words beneath her breath. "More… material things are appreciated, nowadays. And I don't think-" She paused. Pilgrimage. Such a thing didn't exist anymore. Not in the last week. Every Pilgrim has been told, not to return to the Migrant Fleet, but rather Altis in Alliance space. For the first time in history, and probably the last. Everyone had known what was happening, what was about to happen when that Quarian message was sent out and every single one of its sons and daughters and told them the first standing orders of a final journey. "It doesn't matter anymore, does it?"

Because of the Covenant. The realization in her voice was translated across to all of them there. "Why aren't you off? Didn't Shepard ask?"

Mai had turned over her shoulder, looking at Tali, unmoving at Loke's question. Shepard did ask, but just as she told Adams, she had told Mai, and Garrus, and Liara, and all those that had asked. "I relayed to the Fleet I was already engaged with the Geth. I am exempt."

Exempt by connection of course. Her father granted her such discretion, not that she felt any good about it.

"Really not in the mood to go back to your family and stuff, girl?" Doc asked.

"It doesn't feel right." Tali answered, bitter almost. "I don't think our way lies with the Covenant, with the Sangheili."

Mai and JD took a glance at each other, uncomfortable, and yet, reassured. Tali's distrust of the Covenant had settled their own hearts for moments at a time. For once in that galaxy someone else didn't take in the Covenant so well. For all of what was revealed to them about the Covenant with their current state of affairs, the reason for their war against the UNSC was dead simple, and something they all had known for decades: they were vermin to be stamped out.

They saw none of that rhetoric come from the Covenant in regards to the Geth. It was a face that was denied to them and it hurt. That the war against Humanity had not been some mistake, or fluke; rather it had been done in full consciousness.

"I mean, isn't it something though? To have someone else to share your plight with?"

"I wasn't aware the Covenant, the Sangheili, were Quarians?" Tali asked with a hint of malice that almost mirrored Loke's. "They do not share our collective fate. They will _never _understand what lives we have lived, and are not entitled to what we are owed because of it."

She sounded like an Insurrectionist. Mai knew the type of language, years, it felt like, of tuning into Insurrectionist radio frequencies to track target made it so she had to listen. JD knew the sort if only because of High School. That identity that spoke to some sort of radicalization. It seemed so disconcerting out from Tali; someone who seemed and sounded like suck a plucky young woman otherwise. There was hatred, seething from her voice, held back.

A sensitive topic then, Loke reeled back, going back to her work.

More silent minutes had passed before Loke spoke up again to the Chiefs. "Well, found where she was trying to route this data too."

"Go ahead." JD coaxed.

Loke had started reviewing what she had pulled out again from the data stream. "Hackers trying to grab stuff from beacons aren't totally unusual, and most of them we can track by finding their output locations. If I'm remembering my comm buoy locational data correct, she was sending data out to a place not far from here, out here in the Attican… It's weird though."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Not an often-used satellite, and a pretty barebones output node. Usually hackers send these things along nodes that are trafficked by private comm lines, but, well, this one seems bare, and this satellite isn't one used by any of the major players in the region."

JD was trying to make sure he was tracking. "So she was sending data to nowhere?"

"Perhaps. More than that though, it seemed like this request came from nowhere, if hacker SOP is the same."

Tali had perhaps laxed a bit in covering her sector, between going back to the sour thoughts of her people and the fact she had been sitting, however her gaze did catch the quick bob of a shape crest of the hill. She might've been quick to write it off as some visual artifact, a speck of dust floating in such a way to fool her vision, but more and more shapes had appeared a second after that, she going for her shotgun as her voice involuntarily yelped. "Hey!"

Not exactly a clean callout, but it was distressed enough that everyone on perimeter duty had turned.

For Mai it was a turn fast enough to see about five rockets be shot downward toward her.

Time slowed, a huge breath sucked in as she tried to beat rocket propelled ordnance. The rest of the fireteam had barely had time to shoulder their guns and aim up at the crest before she had hopped forward, almost as if diving over the explosives. She hadn't seen the explosives, with surgical precision, blast where she had stood and turn the sand to glass. She had only felt the heat, the crack of concussion through her lower body and the force of the blast outwards propelling her as if she was picked up, throwing her forward through the sky. A sky that belonged to a planet with slightly lesser gravitational pull then they were used to.

This time a Biotic hadn't been there to ferry her.

Tali had been sure that her teeth had been cracked the way she tried to shoulder Wrex's shotgun, firing off the first shot toward the crest of the dunes they had come from, toward those shapes. She was thankful she had a sling now, it bucking out of her hands as it slammed back into her visor.

Doc and JD had been faster on the draw, Doc wielding his Avenger and judiciously opening fire as he moved toward the beacon for cover, Loke getting her rifle out by the time JD had done as he was trained: Push up.

The shapes had glowing eyes, and their silhouettes had been distinctive.

"Contact! Geth!" Doc yelled out as Mai had landed quite a distance away, almost in JD's path if anything. The shock troopers plan had been to go back where they came, using the downward slope as cover before he moved back up to meet them, face to face. That changed when he had seen Mai plant face down, he sliding to her on his knees as Loke and Doc opened up in a slurry of concentrated fire up, Tali's sprinting behind him assuring him that she had roughly the same idea.

She wasn't dead, that much the IFF in his HUD had indicated, however she hadn't taken it well as she creakily rolled over as he took one of her shoulders, with all his might rolling her over, only now noticing her kinetic barrier had been shorted out and golden static was all over her armor. Her shields had also taken a hit.

It'd been a long time since she had been thrown like that, the shock of pain through her body amplifying and subsiding as she felt herself get turned over to a blue sky, only to see an ODST having taken a knee by her, his weapon held up at the firing line making sure none pulled a shot down at them.

The drone of her shields kicking back in had been reassuring, but JD hadn't known, not as its recharging vaporized some of the sand that was thrown onto her form. Landing that hard had buried her somewhat, albeit barely. Only some particles had remained on her visor as she shook herself, grabbing JD's arm, it remaining on her shoulder as if waiting for her to respond, to say anything, to confirm her status. All he had gotten was a squeeze at his wrist as she found her rifle still attached to her, her other hand grabbing onto it.

He wiped his index and middle finger over her dirtied visor, almost as if running his fingers across her cheek. He meant nothing of it but to clear her view, he had gone already as he continued on the firefight with Tali in tow, but just at that moment Spartan Time had kicked in for her again. She never had it done to her, never did it to any other Spartans, but she knew of the move: the language that Spartans spoke only to each other. Of language without words and meaning made of action. She'd never seen this particular one done like this, but it was a tightly held to the heart of the Spartan-IIs. It was a secret Kurt had barely revealed to her, the last time they had ever seen each other. She was to be deployed separately from the rest of Beta Company, for a task that would begin her journey to become the Lone Wolf. Before that however, just as she was loaded onto the Pelican, Kurt had reached up with his index and middle finger to gently, gently, with an almost sad expression on his face, paint an upward curve across his mouth.

That was his goodbye to his greatest student.

The best way she could describe it was a _smile_.

Her inner thoughts left her as the medigel in her suit activated for the first time, the canals that once channeled biofoam where it needed to be channeled now let out the rather different sensation of this galaxy's standard. It was more cooling than she anticipated, spreading out on the side of her body she had landed on; sticking and coating itself as if a shell as it numbed. She could work with it, standing up, shouldering her rifle again after reclaiming it on its sling.

JD and Tali had pushed up the steep slope, JD already tossing grenades over as more concussive thumps went out.

_"Hitman to Normandy. We are currently engaged with the Geth."_

_"Copy all Hitman. We're coming back now, ETA five minutes."_

Comms were in her head as she returned to full combat, sand streaking off her like a buried corpse as her legs propelled herself in JD and Tali's wake.

A Geth had tasted its own medicine as a grenade tossed over the line threw a piece of it over the slope. Tali had another idea:

"Chatika, go!"

The holographic drone was called for again, beaming itself into existence by Tali from her omni, only to disappear back over the slope, a volley of fire directed at it hinting at its fate. It was no worry though, the drone's operating system had been stored in her omni, after all. All it did however was offer a distraction as JD peeked over the side and saw a patrol of Geth: The typical affair, used rocket launchers by their feet as they were distracted by Tali's drone.

He hadn't gotten a shot off before Tali did: a giant hole appearing in one of the trooper, the recoil actually sending her back down the slope. More grenades had come before JD ducked back down, opening up rounds and breaking the kinetic barriers on one trooper before the entire handful turned back to him.

A Spartan had leaped over him, rifle in one hand, knife in another. As she went over, so did he, clambering over as they did a dance they didn't even know they knew.

He reacquired the one Geth he had broken its shields, burning the rest of his SMG's heat tolerances as he made scrap of it, drawing his pistol as Mai had used her DMR to pump and close the distance toward another Geth trooper before slamming into it, knife first.

Tali reappeared as the two focused fire on another Geth together, JD dropping its shields as Tali clambered over, putting another slug in a Geth, it going down in a metal pop as Mai had already moved on in her dance of knives.

When Loke and Doc had climbed up, that had been that with the Geth. The machinations of organic combat forms at such close quarters were never something the Geth could calculate; not when paired against the premier Geth fighting force in the galaxy at that point. The violence of action was still in the Normandy crew's favor, time and time again when the Geth engaged them.

Still, something had changed.

The last Geth had gone down by Mai's account, five shots lacerating its neck and head as its final shots harmlessly bounced off her kinetic barrier, the Geth bodies around them self-destructing already.

"Clear!" It came from Mai's voice far deeper than usual, as if from the very bottom of her throat.

"Clear!" Repeated again and again, for all of them.

Two minutes, perhaps. Six dead Geth.

Panted breaths.

The rocket launchers of the Geth remained last, only self-destructing as Tali approached them, glancing at Mai as she wiped her knife of fluid. "They were aiming at her first." It flowed from her mouth as fast as it came from her head, no one really hearing it. "They really are learning, aren't they?" _Just like father said._

It was emphasized by Alliance and Spectre intelligence: the Geth were capable of learning, by what measure was yet to be learned when it came to combat now, but the very fact that they had singled out Mai…

"Chief Gul?" It was Doc, walking up to her. "You good? You took quite a hit."

"My armor has medigel dispensers. I'm fine." Her answer came fast and hard.

"Helluva armor." Doc was surprised by how easy that answer came, Mai nodding, panting as her entire form breathed in and out, her shoulders pulsing up and down for a few moments before, all at once, she stood as if nothing had happened.

It was redundant, but JD had wanted to ask again as the barrel of his SMG smoked, walking up to her, rounding her and facing her, chest to chest, feet apart. His head bobbed, up and down, once.

She only nodded at him once.

Yeah, she was good.

"Pretty bog-standard contact, nowadays. Didn't know Geth had been here though." Loke vented her assault rifle as she glanced at Doc, the man cursing at himself for not putting his helmet back on. "Never seen them concentrate so much on the first shot though… Jesus, Chief Gul, when was the last time you engaged the Geth?"

"Therum." She answered. It bothered her too, more than she admitted.

Very few times the Insurrectionists or Covenant knew that she had been in the area before she struck. So many resources she had known were dedicated, solely, toward making her the prey, instead of the predator. This felt of that. The Geth had a shot of opportunity, and they took it.

The brush of death, she felt it in her teeth, the adrenaline returning to her and washing out, leaving her cold.

This was the feeling she adored.

"You do what you need to do with the beacon?" JD asked, peering around Mai.

Loke nodded. "Yes sir."

"Alright, we're extracting."

Mai had barely moved as they waited, her arms folding across each other, standing on the edge down, seeing what the Geth were looking down on and that beacon. Her mind had been elsewhere though as the Normandy reappeared above them, Kaiden and several of the Normandy's biotics there, about to rip them back up with their powers.

Before they came back to the Normandy, Mai had decided to do something. JD's shoulder was held onto before he stepped up and waited to be dragged up. He turned to her, head cocked, a silent question asked.

Suddenly, two fingers of hers, gloved in armor and suit, touched the face of his helmet along the crease of his visor. Like a swipe, slow, dragging along the surface where his mouth would have been, she traced a curve. Sand had been dusted on the surface of his visor, leaving behind what she had done. Without words she had done it and started floating up by Kaiden's grace, leaving JD with the ghost of a smile on his face.


	22. 1-16: Soldiers aren't Machines, We're Just People

A/N: That's right fuckers I spartan-smiled them. I'm glad for the reaction I evoked from all of you regarding it, seeing as every single review about that last chapter mentioned it.

Anyway, you're getting another Mai and JD centric chapter so the next one I can jump straight into Feros and I can put on my military writer persona again for a bit, because I do actually want to get ME1 moving along from the rather slow pace we've been going at. Because after Feros and Liara's first mind meld, shit just starts rolling and it won't stop going until I reach my version of the end of ME1.

Feros, at least for my Shepard, will be performed a little differently? I've been highlighting Hitman a lot, for one, because they are my trademark characters that show up in a lot of my other stories, and also because they exist as an asset for Shepard in a sorta ME3-style War Asset kinda way. As in she will use them to their full hypothetical extent. So we're gonna see a full on deployment next chapter.

Another thing to keep in mind about JD and Mai as you're coming to read them and watch them develop is that they are... well, young. They're both 26-27, and for a lot of people here, you're either not that far off from that age, or you're actually older than them. For Mai I don't think it's that much of a factor, but for JD, it is, because he never really had time to be young, after a certain point, and it will shape his decisions going forward. I mean, the man wants to live his life.

* * *

**1-16**

**Soldiers aren't Machines, We're Just People**

* * *

"He turned on me. My teacher. Put a gun to my head, destroyed me, burned me alive." Nihlus Kryik had spoken to the Council, they together in their private chambers, had heard what it was like to die.

"So it's true now, without doubt." Sparatus seemed almost sore, but respectable all the same. The word of a Turian Spectre spoken to him had been great enough to finally settle it all. Nihlus was alive, and he told his story. About Eden Prime, about how he had fought Saren down to the bone and lost, how he saw him kill an innocent man and then turn his gun on him. His survival hadn't just been one miracle, however, but several. Shepard had sought out to avenge him, but it was perhaps, not needed, not when he had been alive… Then again perhaps it was warranted given his current state.

When he came to, he knew he had been awake; as if his head had been against the pillow and he couldn't turn over, that blackness that took him over as, seconds later, he felt the drowning sensation coming from the very pit of his mind. A tsunami of feeling overtaking him in a measure of plain existence which he could only approximate as birth by sleep; where breath eluded him, and yet he had too much of it. He had seen more clearly than he ever had before, and yet wanted to shut his eye. The warmth of fire and yet it felt of ice. His very being spread far and far as if water itself until, all at once, he drew himself back into himself.

He was familiar with the concept of phantom pain. He had lost a good enough chunk of flesh that he had to get grafted and syntheweave skin after a mission for, and he had felt the ghost of sensation where his born flesh and blood had once been. To now feel it over his entire being, it felt odd, but how he felt it had been more of note as he gathered himself in whatever state he was. It was the opposite of having his eyes closed, to see, he had to focus, focus, focus.

Here, now, now, now, now.

There had been a new ceiling to him now, beyond opening his eyes. Seeing too much perhaps.

"Spirits. He's awake." He heard that voice and he leaped at it as a Cat from the Human ecology leaped at light, and when he held onto it, he had truly returned.

Simulated Adaptive Matrix. That was half of what he was now, standing, constrained, at least at present, on a pad borrowed from Avina.

Nihlus had been turned into synthetic life.

A union between flesh and blood, and nodes and virtuality.

Some would call him an AI, in fact, as he had come to and created his consciousness, he had called himself that. Though no, he hadn't been. Technically.

He had been still Nihlus, he was born. Just who he was now was just a trial to save his life.

Whether or not he had been the same Nihlus, well, he would've been skeptical either way. So his personality, at least, had survived the treatment they prescribed to him: setting an AI implant in the middle of his brain, using its matrixes to fill back in the damage on his mind as sustained. Existential questions he didn't think he needed to answer as he awoke from a coma, outside his body, his point of contact with the world nothing more than a holographic display rigged to his body. The mind was so easy to project the image of onesself, that the figure he became on that display had been himself, if not with a few inconsistencies.

Just as he had seen so much more, he had thought so much more the second he had began anew, before the doctors in that room could speak to him. Flooding him, drowning him before instinctively he cut himself off, as if holding his breath.

He could only let go once he had been cognitive of the fact he had been in the presence of his body: charred and mutilated, his head split open and his brain cleanly seen, wires and cybernetics being grafted on it.

"What's- what's going on!?"

"Nihlus! Nihlus! Stay calm, stay perfectly calm!"

Nihlus would've gone against the words of one of the doctors, slamming into a table, trying to touch his own body, but his hands (he had hands now, forming, moving, feeling, just like he knew he could) phased through. He was less than corporeal, and that's when the gears in his mind started turning, the rumors of yesteryear, the very affair before him. He remembered about Alec Ryder's experiments, the search for a synthesis between AI and Organic life so he could save his dying wife. The Spectres were all briefed on it, just in case his research bore fruit. Ryder was ostracized, banished, both in the Citadel and in the Alliance, but yet his research survived, and now, they were brought to bear on Nihlus.

Days passed, feeling like years before Nihlus sorted out a time dilation internally which felt right for him. He had different rules now, as illogical as it felt. He wasn't a body, something constrained by organic limits. He was a mind, unbound now, for the sake of his life. The doctors, and the Council, explained the procedure: how his body was dying and so was his mind, stuck in a coma. The only way anyone saw was to iterate on Alec Ryder's research and sacrifice him to see if anything could be done.

Long-story short, transferred to the Council Archives, he was no nothing more than a brain in a jar, connected to the same network that Avina had been, albeit actually intelligent. They had gotten rid of his body soon after he had awoken. He had no sense of smell anymore, but the doctors described the decay, and understood.

He understood faster, better, than anticipated, or maybe he just had the headspace to recognize that, maybe, perhaps, this was better than dead.

"You're, and try to think abstractly with this," It was mostly Human doctors and scientists following up with him as he remained secluded inside of the private Council dormitories, and even then secluded had been a choice word, he could go anywhere now (in fact, he was everywhere now). "Still what we consider organic life. However, your life, your consciousness, relies on the neural repairs done by what we consider an AI. Our method of communication right now is no more, no different, than well, using a QED platform." The Human doctor went on as he spoke to the hologram that had been Nihlus in his casual clothes, hanging loosely about him. He caught the image of his mirage, his "physical" self, in the reflections of a mirror. He had the wireframe and ghost-like presence of Avina, shades of blue and gray hiding his more distinct features, but his face was still there. He emoted all the same, moved his mouth as he spoke. Why did he do that? He needed emulate a Turian while talking, he was nothing more than electronics and hardware.

He asked and the doctor explained, even as Nihlus himself was frustrated with not knowing, inherently why. "Your mind is still of a Turian, made for Turian biological and psychological responses. You may not need, to say, eat, because your nutrition isn't necessarily tied to a digestive system anymore, but you need to do the motions, as if you were, I believe. This is all so very new, as you can understand, but it's my best guess." Nihlus felt the self he had in audience of that doctor furrow his brow, his mandibles clicking as he tried to take it in. He was everywhere at once in the Citadel, hooked up to systems meant for Avina, and then the broader Extranet. If he tried, he could reach beyond through the network to the broader galaxy, but even thinking about it had made his head explode. Even containing the whole of the Citadel in his peripheral had already been a great mental strain.

"Are you telling me I have to conjure, holographic food, and shovel that in as if I was?"

"We don't know, Nihlus. But we cannot stress enough, you are still you; you are still organic, alive."

They ran him through a debrief, questions of his biographical history, personal questions even he ad been surprised they had (Yes, he did briefly have a relationship in the Turian Navy with a fellow shipmate. Yes, he knew it was taboo. Yes, he did hide it from the Council and Saren.) He answered, and was evaluated, that fact they had been telling him that entire time he had come back: He was Nihlus Krycik.

"You should've just let me die." Nihlus had almost cried at Sparatus as the man was the first to truly talk to him after he had woken up, found his form.

Sparatus shook his head. "You know we wouldn't let that happen willingly."

He paused time for himself, during those moments of crisis, imperceptible now by the true organics around him: giving him hours, days, weeks, months to work out in his head that he hadn't been allowed to die, or that he had seen the other side and seen nothing. It was a terrible thing, to work out that finality alone. Though he was a Spectre. He had been ready to die since he signed up; nothing changed now, given the opportunity to live.

When all was said and done, and when he became, relatively, stable, he was called to the Council's private meeting chamber, and so he had went and appeared. The best way he could describe how he "appeared" and "went" places now was that he blinked, thought about it, as if as natural as walking, so he had. Avina's projection pad had been misleading. He had actually been present of that entire, glassy and steel room, but the projector was limited to its circle, his physical projection constrained, but still handy, it gave the Councilors something to look at, to concentrate. The same had gone for Nihlus.

There, he had told them the truth, as Shepard had said. He had viewed Shepard's trial, and her eventual integration, into the Spectres; recent events about the Geth and investigations into Saren. A lot had happened in his absence, but it wasn't as if he hadn;t already known. Before he knew how to filter his processing, in those hazy first moments when they attached him access to Avina's network connections, a deluge of information was forcibly processed by him. He no longer needed a translator, for example. He had fully understood native Asari or Salarian tongue without it.

"I'm glad you're alive, Nihlus." Tevos had said as they all settled, hearing what Nihlus had to say, putting their doubts about Shepard (minus the Reapers) finally at rest. Saren was a traitor. That, even gifted with the processing power of an AI, had a hard time processing still. "How is it? Seeing the world through the lens of an AI?"

His holographic form flickered before he answered, his voice tinged, not only with Turian flange, but electronic. This was not his voice, but it was generated, approximated. It would take time for it to smoothen out. "Overwhelming." He answered. "This entire Citadel, I can feel it."

"Can you see it all?" Valern folded one of his long fingers below his chin. Damn Salarian, Nihlus thought, always thinking about the intelligence implications.

"I can try, but if I do, it hurts. I can feel it hurting me to expand myself so far." His holographic avatar had only been able to touch itself, his hand touching own chin before palming his eyes. "But if I take a step back, I can see everything in my peripheral, knowing I can turn to exactly where I need to be."

"Is it suffering? Are you in pain?" Tevos asked empathetically.

Turians, good Turians that is, paid no mind to pain. His gut reaction had been to shake his head once, quietly. "I have to keep reminding myself I'm not a computer."

He was not there, in front of them. He knew that they were there, he was taking in information from sensors about the questions they were asking him and thus responding, and for ease of use he had projected an avatar, but he was not, in the traditional sense, in front of them. Their presence to him was inconsequential to as much as every staffer in the Council chambers had been present or the fact he was able to observe one of the C-Sec officers skim a little Red Sand off the top in Station D-9, or a couple record their sexual activities for austerity in another residential ward. He was everywhere and nowhere at once; the only thing limiting him had been what had made him flesh and blood. His understandings of focus were that of an organic man, and so he had to, or else he would think himself to death.

"Do you have a plan for me?" His holographic projection showed more emotion than he had guessed, the Councilors all reeling back for a moment before they looked to Sparatus to give an answer.

"Despite it all, Nihlus, you are still a Spectre." Nihlus figured as much as a chair was generated beneath him and he sat in it, face in his hands. Who would think? Even after a death, the Council still could assign them duty. "Given your current… status, we would advise you to stay in arm's reach, so to say."

There were a lot of things to get used to, to process, now, for him. Though it was what he signed up for when he became a Spectre, and so they were who his soul belonged to now, for the time being.

* * *

"We all good?" Shepard had always been on edge whenever the Geth were in contact without her on the ground, but there was nothing for her to fear as the two Chiefs of the operator gave her a placating nod when the away team returned to the Well Deck. No one looked hurt, but still, she had approached Tali. She too had given Shepard a reassuring motion, unslinging the shotgun as Wrex watched from the background, simply waving his hand off to tell her to give it back to him later. "Well, alright then, debrief in ten."

Requisitions Chief Weston had been quick on collecting guns and gear when prompted, he running over, JD giving over his SMG. He had trusted the man to do the maintenance for him at least, still, that left him open for a comment: "Cute." He tipped his head at the smile on his visor before walking away with an armful of guns. JD had taken off his helmet, seeing that same swipe on his face as he looked up, only to see Mai look away from him. She had not trusted Weston on that measure, finding herself back in her corner as usual, JD following without choice.

She had his back turned to him as she let her rifle down, ejecting its thermal clip for safety, the carbon built up dusting off as Chief Adams grimaced looking at it float to the floor. She had known when he was there, placing her weapon in her locker as she turned around like a ghost, her black visor sucking in the light and reflections of reality, looking down on him.

What she was thinking, feeling, had been beyond JD at that moment, but he had offered his helmet in turn for her to look at. "That mean anything?"

Everything from her meant something. Every action of her holding some sort of purpose or need. Hardly a breath was let go from her without the need. Of all that JD knew of her for how long they'd been together, this meant something. Some something that he couldn't dare guess.

It had surprised him when, after a few moments of her staring silence, she had moved her hands to her own helmet, unsealing herself, the balaclava beneath showing more than the helmet could.

"A sign." She said once, her eyes squarely on his. He had looked away for a moment beneath the focus of her, retaining back as she had gestured with her fingers for his helmet. They traded in short order.

"A Spartan Sign?" The weight of Mai's helmet in his own hands had been still surprising, he taking it into both as he looked at it as if a dismembered head. She nodded, her thumb ghosting that mark she made. Her eyes had softened for a moment, becoming half-lidded.

Never had she done it. Never had she made a mark on someone quite like this.

"It's… a private one."

JD had looked up at her real face, even if her eyes were just offered at that moment. He tilted his head.

"It is used to display…" She looked for a word. "Emotion."

"Emotion?" JD hadn't quite followed, but instead, she had drawn him in with her fingers again, bringing it up to her face, middle and index finger, from left to right, she made a curve along the bottom of her face. Ice jolted through her veins as she completed it, the pure lethargy of doing it without a helmet surprising her as JD did it himself, tracing his lips. A moment after doing it, he had smiled for a moment, realizing what it was emulating.

He remembered what Tali said. There were limits put on people who lived in their armor, to display that sort of emotion was perhaps what the Spartan Signs were supposed to do in some measure. Not every Spartan had been like Mai he figured: so broken down that she had been deprived of that base knowledge.

Though Mai had been his Spartan. The one he had been stuck with, at the very least.

"You did it, without realizing." Mai explained in a short burst, looking away as Shepard and Kaiden had already reconvened in the elevator, heading up. "I was reminded."

"Oh." JD remembered the moment when he did, touching her helmet as she was down.

There was something more to say though as the two had unconsciously moved behind the Mako, alone as they could be on the Normandy as the sound of the rest of the fireteam geared down. JD had gone to unbuckle his gauntlets, their helmets placed besides each other on their gear bench, but Mai had stopped him, a hand on his forearm.

When did they get so touchy? When did she even feel that barrier of physicality go down between them? Was it holding his hands, shaking it, on the Montenegro? As if sealing her life into an agreement with him? Was it picking him up and tossing him into the back of the Pelican on the Ardent Prayer as they tried to make their escape? It had been years, literal years, since she had touched someone without meaning to kill someone. JD had been the first to not suffer that injustice. He had suffered the pain though, the feel of her grip nearing breaking his bone without her thinking, but nowadays, just a sparse two months since they had known each other, Mai had made it a part of their communication. She had so, so much off the Spartan baseline, and she realized it, then and there, holding his wrist before he continued.

"Are we… fitting in? Is this the life we're going to live?"

Introspection from Mai, he didn't expect to hear it. He didn't expect to hear the fear in her voice. "Mai?"

As if a surge had rocked through her, as if rebooting, she had removed her hand and stepped back, turning away. "Nothing."

It wasn't nothing. "Mai." He said her name again. "What's wrong?"

It didn't matter if this wasn't the life she was supposed to live. This wasn't the Spartan she was supposed to be. She was a Spartan, and he was an ODST. Soldiers to their duty. Anything that didn't contribute to that was dangerous. What had been growing on her, moving her off center-

"Nothing." She said again, with steel, JD pedaling back as he caught a word in his throat, finally thinking on the question. His throat had been raw and hurt, not because he had been sick, but because he had been talking at all. His entire life he hadn't talked as much as he had now, on the Normandy. He was turning into the normal he thought he wasn't, keeping his mouth shut on so many deployments outside of affirmatives and negatives. He saw where Mai had been asking: This life had been changing them.

No, he realized. This life was making them.

* * *

"We engaged another Geth picket on the way back to the Mako." Ashley and Emerson had led their own fireteam, the Normandy having deployed them on a nearby planetoid as well during Mai and JD's own deployment. It meant a relatively full comms room that day as the debriefings went down. Shepard had made a note in her mind as Ashley continued. "There wasn't any complication, just another shoot and scoot, but I bet my next shore leave that something is up with their tactics nowadays."

Emerson had affirmed. "Given that the Geth are self-learning in a way," he motioned to Tali, who had been kind enough to share this information when prompted about the Geth recently, "Shouldn't there be a concern that we are the tip of the spear when it comes to us engaging them?"

Shepard had nodded at the two, leaning on the comm console, more specifically squaring her vision on Emerson.

She had known of the man from Ryder, even before the Normandy. She had heard of Hitman in vague recollections from her mentor as well, but it had been Emerson she had heard the name of. He didn't fall too far from Ryder's tree, younger, yes, but still with all the stringiness that Ryder had been known for as an N7 Commander. Still, it wasn't without cause. The two N7s had agreed that Emerson would've passed the N-program with little issue, however the man had his own misgivings.

_"He'd rather stay a mud rucker. Bigger badge means bigger responsibility for him, and he's not too keen on it." _Ryder told Shepard, what felt like so long ago immediately after Torfan. _"Not everyone can be an aspiring superstar like you."_

The Old Man rung in her head as she curled her lips up, understanding the implication that Emerson, and indeed most of the room had echoed: that the Geth's fighting standard would become the SOF-grade that the Normandy ground teams were. Still, there were particular deceptions Shepard could fool machines with. "Why do you think I've been diversifying ground teams like I have?"

A wave of realization wiped over the two fireteams present. Not one had been the same across the Normandy's side-missions that Shepard had put them all on.

"Ah, shit." Ashley had just straight out said.

Shepard could only respond, a charmed chirp coming out of her throat as she held one cheek cutely. "I figure Geth calculations don't like it when they never face the same people twice. Hell, it's why I've been holding back Chief Gul for a hot minute, especially since the report from her team shows the Geth got something special for her."

Mai had still been in her armor, then and there, the seat beneath her barely holding, though her helmet had been off, her balaclava left behind in the Well Deck. To see that particular combination, her head small in comparison to the proportions of her armor, it had made Emerson, for all his sourness toward her, pause. Mai had been paused as Shepard recounted what had happened to her and the fact five rockets had been aimed at her as an opening shot. They had only spoken so far, in the debrief, about the nature of their Geth engagements. "I can take it, Commander." Mai had spoken, blank faced as she looked directly at Shepard.

Tali had squinted her eyes at Mai, a fact that she wasn't entirely oblivious to.

Shepard had seemed barely phased by her gaze, but there, as always, had been a challenge to it. "I know you can, Chief Gul, but I don't want to be the one who gives you the mission where you find out you can't."

_Then what was she there for then? _Mai had thought to herself.

Then again, it wasn't entirely unprecedented. The area of which Mai operated it had still been far, far beyond what anyone there save JD could understand.

_Entire militias…_

That simply just wasn't what the mission of the Normandy was: to wage the warfare Mai had been meant for.

"Still, from what I've read in the preliminary, you handled the satellite rather well. Hitman 1, go on."

JD had been the man on point for explaining as Loke and Doc simply slunk back, almost nodding off. This hadn't been their rodeo, either with Shepard or Ryder.

"Wasn't much to say prior," JD rubbed his chin, he down to just his uniform. "Mai arrived on site first and drove off the leech. After that, she remained in position until we could establish perimeter security and defragging of the hacking efforts."

Shepard had seemed just a hint interested as her gaze landed on Mai again. "A hacker, right?"

Mai nodded. "Single woman, armed, but I doubt dangerous. I got the jump on her ma'am."

"Was removing her any difficult?"

_"Damn you, woman. Damn you."_

_"What would you do for your daughter? Please."_

"I didn't like doing it."

She liked the execution of the kill. She liked it done flawlessly, effectively, without mercy. Perfection in her art was standard. All of it hostile, of murder and warfare and conflict that seemed so depraved and nihilistic. Mai reeked of that energy, even if she didn't say. To admit that she didn't like running off a hacker, the entire room rose an eyebrow physically, or internally as Mai blinked once, deciding to elaborate no further. She ran off a mother.

How many times did she know what it was like to be on the otherside?

Memories. Memories she thought long destroyed in her mind had been brought forth: of a version of her that seemed impossibly smaller, holding the hand of her mother as a store owner screamed at her to get away from his trashcans, sheltering her from the hatred of that world.

The pain of failing her daughter. Mai knew that look on Kelsie's face. It was the same bitter, angry, sorrowful look her mother had worn for so long. The face of her mother… What did it look like again?  
"Chief Gul?"

"Ma'am?" Like a VI, those words had sprung Mai back into full coherence, but not before something was given up. Something Tali and JD had noticed so intimately.

"Were there any other complications?"

"No ma'am."

Cracks in the machine, shining light through. Was it breaking? Or was something shedding its skin? Shepard had her reservations still, but if there was anyone to be mad about the nature of the two special Master Chiefs on her crew, it wouldn't be them. Not when JD seemed, by all accounts, a normal man and Mai, within herself, had morality to contend with, like she saw now. Orders were orders after all, and the two seemed like the order following type.

So was she, to be fair to herself, but she had stretched that definition further than had been healthy.

"The combat telemetry we're getting from the Geth though, it's revealing." Tali had spoken up, still shy in this instance, but she had been coming into her own. "My father, back on the Flotilla, he specializes in anti-Geth measures…"

Shepard pursed her lips once before nodding at Tali's comment. "You really were born to fight Geth, weren't ya, Tali?"

The Quarian nodded, slowly, but knowingly, leaning back into her chair, wondering to herself how she had become like this so easily. Just a few weeks, and a people who enjoyed what she was doing, was all that it took. Perhaps some of them were right: she was an NBK. If there was time for Tali to respond back, it hadn't been now, she tracing her hood that laid now on her shoulders instead of over her head.

* * *

JD had made a pinching motion over his mouth as the debriefing had been over and the two walked out together. Just some more housekeeping stuff past that, and for them to stay condition green for more away missions. It had been a pinching motion with all his fingers, a quiz, to be sure, in some way.

"Food?"

"Eat." JD corrected Mai as she tried to guess, stepping asides to let the rest of the crew of that away mission through as Shepard stayed behind and sent off mission reports. "Want to come with?"

She was out of her armor again, before the debriefing, down to her tech suit with her uniform over that. She considered the question, the answer, for a few moments, but those few moments had a new clarity to JD after the away mission. Tali's observances rang true, with the way her eyes seemed to burrow into him. To him, he had known how to deal with her harshness.

She nodded once, "Okay."

It wasn't often that they did share meals at all. More often than not it was a correct assumption JD would share meals with Garrus or Tali, and, if warranted, with Kaiden or Shepard. It was easy to eat with Shepard, if anything. She would fill in the space he left with his own rather introversion to speech. He was a good listener, if anything. Garrus and Tali had been much the same way, enough to share themselves over a meal, downtime, on the Normandy. Perhaps it had been consequence that they were, of all the aliens there, the most "normal", but that had been their clique.

JD saw it on every ship he served on: the social circles formed regardless of the shared uniform. Officers to officer, ODSTs to ODSTs, fly boys versus tankers, every had their group. On the Normandy, it was looser, but still they existed. Hitman would stay amongst Hitman, and the crew would be among the crew. It was Mai that had been truly alone in her solitude, and admittedly, as JD sometimes drank coffee as Garrus went on during breakfast about one of his early detective cases, he forgot that.

It wasn't as if Mai had minded… but she knew it was a stark difference from when they were in Buffalo together. It was something missing from her; the new her, that she hadn't had before.

It was easy, falling back within his wake again, but she was intently aware of it now as they walked down the stairs down to the cupboards where the Normandy had its provisions on the crew deck. Not enough room for a kitchen, so everything the Normandy had had been packaged. Not the worst thing, all things considered. Supply lines for the Alliance, and for the Normandy in particular, hadn't been the worst JD had seen. The days behind enemy lines where he and his unit had to take supplies from locals had been the worst; had made him see it the way of the Insurrection, but war was war, and right now, there had been no war.

"You have a preference for breakfast food?"

Mai had been aware of it after she noticed the trend. In Buffalo, it was out of pure practicality: the way JD had made dozens and dozens of PB&Js and cereal bowls during their self-imposed isolation as they dove into galactic history and Alliance history. Easy food, and it wasn't as if they could cook anything. Those days that they did go out however to the diner, he always ordered foods she'd considered breakfast.

"Mm." He made a confirmative sound in his throat, getting out of the way and offering her her choice from the stacks and stacks of suction-sealed packages after he picked his own. She hadn't looked as her hand found one of them, pulling away. It really didn't matter to her. The crew deck hadn't been too full that day. Liara had been in the medical bay with Chakwas, a space made for her there. Otherwise Hitman had mostly taken the Well Deck for their own today, a sparse few members hanging out as they otherwise awaited their shift in the sleeper pods or on their omnis, reading or watching something or another. They had, as usual, regarded Mai with a hint of suspicion, but that far into the Normandy's mission all pretexts had fallen away that Mai had been a threat that Ryder espoused. Not when Shepard had picked up that intrigue now with her Reaper visions and place as Spectre.

"Chiefs." Harris had been one of the Hitmen, if not the only Human on the Normandy, perhaps able to size up Mai and Wrex. He had been sitting on the opposite side of the deck's table, with Bannon, eating their own meals. Bannon had given a nod to both of them.

"Corporal." JD had addressed him back as Bannon gave him a wink. She was a coy Hitman, if anything. Whereas Ashley and Loke had been fiercer for the love of the fight, Bannon had been that sort of eccentric that was perhaps a little… twisted? JD had known enough people off their rocker who had loved the war. It meant they could be themselves: chaos and all. A Cheshire smile chasing their own demons to make them dance. For Mai, in the moments she saw Bannon before taking off on her own away missions, saw the fire in her eyes. Saw it reflected in many of her Spartan-III comrades. Orphans of the Covenant War, seeking their revenge against them and life itself.

They sat down, unbothered for once, as the softer light provided to the table, Mai just now seeing what she had gotten: Spaghetti. She was allotted a second packet for her meals, typically, much like the Biotics onboard, however she would take her time today.

The process for heating up the entire meal had been simple enough, cracking open the package and dumping the tray and provided accessories out. A folding cup and a plastic spork/knife had been offered with the tray, the main meal packet with the food kept in as the rest was taken, a chemical packet dropped in heating it up as the package was sealed again. When they would be opened after a few minutes, they'd be meals, ready to eat. The vitamin drink had been in their cups ready to sip from, however.

JD did take a sip as Mai sat politely, looking at the orange color of it idly before she heard him speak. "About what you asked earlier..."

Right. Mai had taken a sip herself as the two packages expanded on their trays, heating up their meals. "I didn't mean anything."

An attempt to dissuade, but JD knew better as his cup was put down. "Mai?"

Just the sound of her name, after so long, to hear it so often, it did something to her. Since when did this become her normal? How did she deserve this?

"I overheard you and Mister Vakarian talking about C-Sec, over lunch."

JD had told her his intentions, at least, after all the grief he had given her for applying for a transfer without notifying him. She had thought nothing of it. Just a logical conclusion to his life: his father was a cop, so too would he. It's what he deserved if it made him comfortable, but it got her worried, thinking, as Garrus and him seemed so naturally themselves in each other's presence.

_"Sooo." Tali would start about two days after the conversation he was having with Mai right now. "Who are you spoken for JD?"_

_Garrus and JD had choked on their respective dinners as they all shared Garrus's bench for a table. Garrus had given a tilt of his head to JD, his mandibles flicking a bit in question. He was still getting used to it, but at least he was able to read Garrus's face a bit now. He was questioning him._

_The shock trooper glanced over at his locker, and Mai had been at their workbench, field stripping weapons, out of her armor. Now more aware of her superhuman hearing, but it didn't matter. It wasn't as if he was hiding this from her._

_"Someone."_

_"Male or female?"_

_He remembered shore leave one deployment, how the unit was being divided up and sent out to shore up other units that were in need of replacements. One last hurrah at the bar, and even JD had toasted that day. Celebrating that they didn't die while they were with him. He used to think that with the drink, he didn't mind that one of the younger men of that squad had taken him asides in that bar's dark corner and kissed him. He used to think that, while inebriated, he didn't think too much of how he kissed back._

_Nowadays he didn't think of it awkwardly at all, brought back forth for a split second as Tali brought the issue up._

_"Female." He said, clarifying, Garrus catching on to what they were discussing and what he had missed from that last away mission, a coy look over his face. "Her name's Dawn."_

_"Wife?" Tali assumed. If she were a Human, perhaps she would've glanced at JD's finger to affirm, but she didn't have that knowledge of wedding bands. JD shook his head immediately. "Fiancé? Girlfriend?"_

_"Not… really?" It was JD's failure that he had hesitated in just the right way saying it._

_Garrus had rolled his eyes as he elbowed JD's side. "Really?" He pegged her for what she was to him._

_"What? What?" Tali seemed intrigued as it dawned on her. "OOOOooh… Nice." She said with that almost innocent, yet playful sheen that she had off mission. That was the Tali JD enjoyed being around._

_"Turian ships tend to have… similar arrangements throughout the crew." Garrus had said with as much subtle snark as he had shown thus far. "I admit, Shepard might run a rather loose crew, but it doesn't quite match the Turian Navy at times…"_

_"Oh? Why is that, Garrus?" Was that a tease in her voice? It was a tease, JD decided._

_It was a miracle the translator had been able to get the innuendo behind the story the Turian told, Tali leaning in to Garrus as he told it as if they were no more than teenagers at an ill-supervised band camp, but having an audience like Tali and the usually unflappable JD had him really eager to tell a story about "reach" and "flexibility."_

_"It usually happened after the fact. Not before." JD said after it all. "Shore leave. She wasn't military."_

_"Ah. Makes sense. Shame though. Taking that sort of steam of prior to a high-risk mission is… liberating? I guess."_

_"I guess?" JD chuckled at the Turian. "You don't sound too sure of yourself."_

_"Oh shut up, don't give me that."_

_Tali had been giggling at the thought of Garrus's impotency, but it was a joke that could only be made if they had been friends, and with the way JD shook his head and returned a smile to an over-it Garrus, they had been. JD had finally been friends with aliens._

"Worried I'm leaving too soon?" JD had chided as their lunch's packets let off some steam, deflating. Harris and Bannon had made their leave soon after, leaving the two alone. He had tried to play it off, but it bounced off her.

"You'd be leaving the military."

There was no escape from it then. JD straightened his back as he really thought about it. He joined the war to fight against a threat, so great, the last time an equivalent happened in this galaxy they ended it by genetic genocide. To think of a solution to a problem being _genocide_, the problem itself must've been a measure beyond him, only to remember that he had been in the middle of such a genocide back home. Perhaps it was that inconsequential standing that did spur him to fight. That was missing in this Galaxy, at least now. Even with the Reapers hanging over them, it was still an unknown that he left to Shepard to fully work out.

"Because I have the chance to do so now, Mai."

"Does this not provide you what you need in life?"

Their meals stopped deflating, ready to be taken out to eat.

"Perhaps," he answered, "But there's no wars for us. Not the one I want to fight, anyway. We can be at peace, and I think we deserve that."

To deserve…

One of her handlers used that word once, to describe what an encampment of Insurrectionists she was tasked to take out had coming for them. They deserved to be killed. What did she deserve? She thought of it as the two of them removed their meals.

A breakfast sandwich for JD, biscuits, an egg patty, and a sausage patty beneath that. A rather soggy pair of hashbrowns also followed onto his plate. Not really a plate meant for a spork, as he simply grabbed it and placed the sandwich down on his tray, letting it steam off a bit.

Mai's meal had been a little more involved, letting the red and brown assortment of pasta and sauce slop onto the tray's main divot, chunks of beef intermingled as it steamed up. Her nose told her it was a savory meal, but she had stopped tasting food a long time ago. Her body was always like that it felt, even before her training, her transformation. Food had no taste for her, only sustenance. She also probably wouldn't imagine anything coming out of garbage cans to be good tasting anyway. Still, in all her years, for all that training that cost the UNSC untold millions, they had not been clear on how to eat spaghetti.

Hyper-competency left her lacking as the noodles slid off her spork as she tried to scoop it up. She was distinctly unfamiliar with the food as she saw her conundrum. JD hadn't noticed until after he took his own first bite, the way Mai had been craning her head, frowning, half way considering summoning a tool from her omni to try and eat it. It took JD a while to realize what he was seeing, but when he did, he didn't quite believe it.

"Uh, Mai?"

She didn't want to hear him as again she dove her spork in, catching only a single strand of pasta as she guided it to her mouth, using her teeth to draw it in and chomp it down rather uncivilized-like.

She had done it again as he uncomfortably kept eating his sandwich, seeing Mai struggle to get no more than two or three strands in at a time. Only when she had given up and grabbed the sides of her tray, presumably to just funnel it in, did JD finally act in.

"Hey hey hey." He said fast, trying not to draw the attention of anyone else on the deck. No one had seemed to notice. Off in the corner by the IT kiosks for mail checking had been Kaiden and a few of Hitman's Biotics, talking of techniques to train Liara in. Otherwise people were always shifting in and out of sleeping shifts, or leaving Chakwas office after some concern or another. Mai had stopped as JD had his own spork in his hand, still not quite believe he had to show a Spartan supersoldier how to-

He had dived the spork right into the mass of it, only to twirl it as pasta twisted around the head and neck, enough for him to take out and show to her. The rest (hopefully) she could find out, and she did as her eyes brightened, she emulating and getting an almost too big clump of spaghetti on her spork, only to shove in her mouth.

JD had seen Wrex eat, and still, it was somehow more dignified then how Mai did somedays.

With her newfound technique she had finished the meal before JD had even returned to his own, the marks of sauce on the edges of her mouth as her tongue darted out to lick it off. She seemed annoyed the fact that happened, a little grit and grudge in her voice as she said nothing more than a: "Thank you."

Going to her drink she had slammed it down before JD could respond.

"Uh, well, I'm Italian, so I'll be damned if I don't teach you proper how to eat pasta." Also to avoid the messages that would come over the ship's IM service about seeing Chief Gul eat spaghetti that way.

Teach. That word hung over Mai as JD ate again.

"You don't have to teach me. To be a teacher." She said, quietly, seeing him nod at her softly as he swallowed a bite, however she amended that almost immediately. "I do appreciate though, what you do."

"I'm not about you to let you eat spaghetti like that." JD plainly, seriously explained, as if she didn't get that.

"No, no. I mean, the other things you teach me." There was panic in JD's eyes, his two index fingers twirling around each other. "No. Not that. That's fine. Acceptable. I want that."

"Then what?"

She wasn't quite sure why she was raising the topic, this new and unknown thing to her known as small talk, or rather, talking with a confidant. Though she took it as she always took the unknown: with all that she had.

"I don't know if you mean it or not, but you make me think about… myself."

"Huh?"

"What I have. What I don't have. Who I am. Are you making me think that way?"

JD had been a little flabbergasted, a little taken aback. He hadn't been trying to manipulate her, if that was what she was saying. "I'm not really trying anything with you Mai. Not anymore than I would with anyone else."

Her eyes had honed on him, a slight furrow to them again as she took him in her mental sights.

"You make me feel like there is more out there for me. With your actions, on how you're thinking."

"I'm… sorry?" The logic was confusing, but it was something that bothered her. It really did, and the only way she could articulate was in words like this.

"I don't _want _to know more. I don't want to _be_ more." The way JD had spoken of the future, of his own plans he had that he never had before, it put things into perspective for her. Thinking the way he did, she was given an answer: there was nothing.

"But you deserve to." He had been holding his sandwich all the while, only putting it down now.

"You do. Not me."

"I don't think so."

"It's my decision, though."

JD sucked in his teeth as Mai looked at him with those piercing blue eyes. They seemed sad, though she was right. It wasn't up to him, and he couldn't impose. It was true, that he did want her to change, to become more than what she was now. Though that was true with anyone else he had been friends with, thought highly of, he understood there existed a _certain _connotation with that wish with Mai.

"I want you to be well, Mai. I treat you as such."

Her hands fidgeted, putting her spork asides. "Can I ask then, why you are this way with me? Because you have to?"

JD twitched his nose for a second, looking dead serious at Mai, insulted a bit, but his eyes became low, soft, almost sad. "You have your moments, Mai." Two fingers, over his face, dragging a smile over it.

A breath from Mai, the hint of amusement, of a laugh. That was new from her, JD immediately pegged as he emulated the language of Spartans. She didn't fight it, that feeling, that inexplicable feeling of seeing an ODST, a regular man, take one of the Spartans' most sacred signs and use it so casually with her. "Hah."

JD had barely heard it, but he heard enough as a smile spread across his face naturally. "I want to be your friend, Mai. Unless you don't want me to-"

"No-" Mai caught herself, a reaction that erupted from her throat as she even considered that thought.

JD settled himself back, letting the words fall out of him. The truth of what he thought. "I don't want to presume anything, but, well, there _are_ some things you just need to know… to learn. That's what I have to help you with if I am your friend. Things you wouldn't have known with how you lived."

"Learn what?"

Where could he start? "The, whole of it, of you."

You.

Spartan B-312.

Mai Gul.

Mai. Like My. Not May. Gul. Like ghoul.

What was there of her beyond the rank? Beyond being a Spartan? Pain. The dirty underbelly of New Jerusalem. Something she was told to leave behind, and even if not, did she really want to go back there?

"What does it mean to be you, JD?"

She had been saying his name softer nowadays. Not so hard on the D, any softer and she'd be saying Jade. Though he didn't mind it, to be honest.

"Hm?"

"To be… Italian?" That wasn't what she wanted to ask, but it was a word she could cling to, barely scraping at the surface of a whole question.

"What?"

"To be raised into… something? Normal. Italian is normal, right?"

When he did tan, JD tanned very well, almost into an olive. His Nona still kept up her home cooking, bringing pizza and fresh baked focaccia to their apartment on weekends, speaking of Sicily and Rome when she visited her own grandparents when she was just a wee child. Stories of Gladiators and of Gods filling his minds as she tucked JD in. It was different, to him, than being signed his bed time stories. When he asked Mom later, on how to translate to her what Nona was telling him, she came up short. There was no sign for Spartan.

JD shrugged. "Yeah… Why?"

"Where I came from, New Jerusalem, race, religion, ethnicity, they were all so strong a factor. How people define themselves against each other. It's not really like that, is it?"

New Jerusalem. That world, torn itself apart without the Covenant, only to be halfway glassed when they did come. A planetary crusade and jihad fighting against each other as peoples tried to claim a planet entirely for themselves. He knew the stories very well, and he remembered Shepard's vision: How violent and dirty and dark it had been. That was Mai's birth rite.

"Those type of things, my race, my culture, I mean, yeah, they help me be me, but…" JD chose his words carefully. "They don't have to mean anything."

"I'm Arab." Mai looked down at her empty tray as she said it, the dull reflection looking back up at her, her fingers unconsciously ghosting the imprint of her necklace beneath her suit. "But my mother believed in, I think, Buddhism. That is not… traditional."

A thought. "Your father?"

Mai paused before answering. "I was never exposed to him."

"Oh."

How close she was to being an orphan. Luna's cities had their fair share, especially the further the war went on. Memories of the elder Durante dealing with those misguided youths had rose.

"How do we find ourselves, if not who we are?"

A question far beyond a Marine's capability to answer, and yet he wasn't just a Marine was he? He wasn't just an ODST. He had a name, a life, a lover, a father and mother; dreams and nightmares, feelings. Some deployments, all he had were a nickname. Greenie, New Guy, Ishmael, **Rookie. **Some of them lasted for so long, he thought to himself, was that really all that he was? Just a guy named Rookie? No. He had dealt with this question before in his quietness, alone in his own thoughts.

"By other people." He answered. JD remembered them all.

Captain David Janowski. Leader of an ODST Platoon charged with defending Persei. His first ODST CO. He died, somehow, leading a charge into the jungle against a Brute encampment. He remembered, before the drop in, he had taken him asides and told him: "If you're scared. Good. That means you value your life."

Lance Corporal Misato Bando. Combat Engineer. Blew herself up when Hunters overran her position, hoping to take them with her. Her mother had breast cancer, and thus, by way of that, knew a few tricks about taking a nap in the field that she passed down to JD.

JD had thought Mai was considering that answer, silence coming over her as she stared at him, only to slightly tilt her head, her hair drooping slight. It dawned on him that it hadn't been pondering. She was looking at said answer, manifest.

"Can you talk about yourself, JD?"

"Huh?"

"If I listen to you do it, maybe I can emulate."

JD blinked a few times. He had let on details of his childhood, of his life before he became a Marine, bits and pieces, but nothing so plain. Nothing so laid out that she could read.

"I mean, well, what do you know of me Mai?"

How natural it was for them to be together, and yet to not really know each other. Yet there was that feeling of knowing each other anyway. Perhaps it was a survival instinct? Perhaps not. JD wished, if that was the case, that it hadn't been so dire.

Her eyes glazed over for a moment, eyes darting downward at his hands before, a split second later, remained on his own eyes. "Your name is Jonathon-Jameson Durante. You're 26 years old. You're Italian-American. Your mother was deaf and your father was hearing, so thus you learned how to communicate with both speaking and in sign. Your father served as a detective in the Cirsium City Police Department and he died of food poisoning when you were 17. Shortly thereafter you joined the UNSC Marine Corps with an age waiver, and served during the defense of Persei, where you survived a Glassing. Your mother died shortly after. After that you volunteered to join the ODSTs, and you spent the next nine years-"

"Mai?" He had been taken on a roller coaster of a biography, all harsh and edged with unkind corners, she stopped. "Is that really all you've gotten from me?"

Mai paused for a moment again before speaking, "You had a _physical friend _named Dawn Harris on Cascade."

Heat rose to his cheeks, Dawn's voice in his ears. "_At least call me Lover, Jon."_

JD's eyebrows had furrowed down, and with that, Mai had despaired internally.

She felt as if she had given him the wrong answer, but she didn't know why, rubbing the knuckles of her hands with her fingers.

He had caught the facial movement however, softening. "I'm not everything that's happened to me, Mai."

Inside her head Mai knew the meaning now of grasping for straws as she tried to find the words, the right things, to describe JD beyond who he was. It bewildered her to a point, thinking beyond the man that was sitting right before her. How did she look that beyond? She damned herself for thinking of Shepard. Shepard was so natural with this and she wasn't and it hurt.

"I like music." It brought Mai out of her turmoil as JD looked away, almost embarrassed to admit. "I would listen more, but, well, music players are contraband, technically. It's nice to fall asleep to music but well, the one time I did do that I missed a roll call and the CO gave me trouble for it." He seemed distant, opening up like that. "Mom, she liked it when I was learning how to play guitar."

On New Jerusalem, Mai would remember street performers trying to eek out an existence as they played on their corners. She remembered the wooden instrument JD spoke of. "You play?"

JD's eyes glazed over for a bit, remembering those last days on Luna. With his family passed, he had inherited his childhood home: the apartment. He had no use for it with how rotations and shore leave worked for the ODSTs. Just constantly at ready, with breaks at whatever planets the ship they were stationed on were docked at. He never came home after he left, so, maybe, if the landlord didn't evict him by proxy, that guitar was still neatly on his twin-sized bed, collecting dust for nearly a decade. "Haven't for a while. I wish I did."

Silence again, filling in as the ambient sound of the Normandy filled it in, Mai's digging her suited fingers into themselves as a tension there broke by her, boiling inside of her mind. "I don't know what that means, JD."

"What?"

"I- I know it means you like music. You like the topic of music. You are interested in it… but, but-" She cut herself off, a hint of hysteria in the back of her voice she caught and killed so coldly, so ruthlessly as she squared her shoulders. "What if I correlate your interest in music as something wrong, if I think… more upon it?"

"Try me." JD softly said.

Mai had responded without precaution, surprising herself. "You're regretful."

Not the answer that JD had thought she'd spew, but she did. She was right. "How did you get that?"

Mai's voice wavered, but she went forward, hidden behind her husky strong tone that she wore by default. It didn't fit, but this was untrodden ground for her. "Music is a civilian interest. To not be able to do so… it means that there are other interests of yours that you have not been able to partake."

Career day. 12 years old. The Elder Durante had showed up to school along with a bunch of other fathers and mothers to talk to the kids about what they did for a living. Of course, JD had beamed at the fact his Dad was visiting to hear him talk about work, but there had been another interest piqued that day. One of the fathers had proudly showed off a giant paper dragonhead. He was a dragon dancer with the local Chinse community, and for a brief, wonderful time, the young JD had wanted to be a dragon.

"Perhaps," he answered, a pang of wist in it. "I don't quite know anymore. I've been serving for so long I'm not quite sure what I'm interested in anymore."

"Then you understand then," Mai had seen a thread and reached for it, grabbed it as tight as she could. JD looked at her again, differently. "What it's like if _this _life becomes all you know."

He was careful with his words, tapping the table once before idly grabbing the spork. "Not as much as you would understand."

"But it's not just me."

JD paused for a moment, feeling his teeth come together, staying his breath. "You said you like farms." A lifetime ago it seemed Mai had said to Shepard on any interests she had. The Spartan drew the quickest idea she could, however there was some truth to it. On an agricultural world inhabited by Insurrectionists, she hid in fields of grain and wheat, and for a moment, she was distracted as the stalks towered above her as she passed through. How alive they were, how much they promised in life, swaying in the wind. It was so unlike the harshness of New Jerusalem as she looked up and saw not dark skyscrapers and industrial decay, but blue skies and golden fields. It captivated her. One of the only things that ever did. "That means you like to grow. To cultivate. Create maybe?" JD went on, trying to extrapolate as he, and most normal people he imagined, tried to tie interests to character. "I see it, you know, in how you are so intent to learn from me. That is a sort of growth. To create maybe? I dunno…"

"I like to… create?" She was a Spartan. She was made to do everything but, and it seemed lunacy. Though she thought about it for a second, imagining herself planting seeds (Grain was seeds, she hoped she was right) into loamy soil and then watering it, seeing it rise from the Earth so cleanly, so naturally. "It seems to be a positive trait."

"Yeah." JD echoed. "I think, you think, if you like farming, you like to create things, instead of, well, you know…" He scratched his dog tags. "Do you enjoy destroying, Mai?"

Mai blinked. "I like a successful mission."

JD wasn't enthused, but he understood the feeling.

"I was told, everything I've done, it was for the betterment of Humanity. Everything that I would do, then, was a net good." A crack, a dip down, at the end of her sentence. Said out-loud, she didn't really believe that. She couldn't believe that she did have that doubt now.

"You're loyal." JD gave her. "I know you're loyal. To me you are, from how you've treated me so far."

"To you. I am loyal to you."

"And me to you."

He didn't know why he had to affirm, but she was, in some small part inside of her, glad that she did, however she thought of it. "Is it… because we're military? We are allies?"

"Yes? No? Does it matter?"

"I want to know." She said in such the same way she asked for translations of some signs, for clarification. He responded just the same.

"Now, if I was not an ODST, or if I refused to serve the Alliance, would you be the same way to me?"

"Yes. Yes." She said twice, once to him, and then to herself.

"Then it must be because of who I am, beyond that."

And so what was that, was the question that Mai contended with. Something very naturally settled in her mind as she noticed the movement of her fingers, the nervous tic she knew she had: rubbing her fingers together and on her knuckles. Hands, fingers-

"You're very patient with me. You are understanding then." Mai had remembered all the time, all the slowness of their initial lessons in sign language, on how JD never seemed to mind remaining on a single movement for dozens of minutes at a time as she fretted over exactness. He made her comfortable; a luxury very few ever paid her mind to. Something bubbled in her throat. "Thank you."

A smile formed on JD's mouth at its corners, rubbing behind his ears. "You're very polite. Formal. Did your mother teach you that, or did Ambrose?"

"Training was… strict."

"You don't have to be, with me, you know."

"It feels right, though."  
He leaned back in his chair. "There's no such thing as rank, between us, Mai. Not really. Not now."

"But I respect you."

It was his turn to laugh a little, and, surprisingly, she had joined in with low chuckles. Humans were social creatures, and that was proven true still.

"Respect me enough to tell you who you are?" JD asked after they settled.

"Well, I don't know who I am. You seem to see… more in me then I think there is."

"I think?" He parroted.

She saw his disapproval, reeling back. "I mean, you might expect too much of me."

"People can change, can grow." He said softly.

"How've you changed?" She asked with an amount of depth that seemed so unlike her, but for the better.

JD took another sip of his drink, soothing his throat. "I talk more." His mind yelled at him for censoring the spoken words. In his head it read like this: _I talk a lot to you. More than I have to anyone. _"What do you think, for you?"

She looked at his face again; really to look at him. The bottom part of his face had been getting fuzzy in patches, but left untouched, as his chestnut hair above had been getting its fluff. Without the war, without the Covenant, she remembered the look on his eyes when she first met him and saw his face. They had been so, so heavy. So tired. Now they were alive.

"I'm not sure. But I have- I am. Changing. I am changing."

If she could talk to the Mai of three months ago, what would she think of herself? Disgusted? Disappointed? Or, maybe, just maybe, would she be glad of her?

Maybe it didn't matter.

Maybe the opinion she cared more for now was the man across from her.

"Do you still think me being a Spartan is wrong?"

JD's mouth sucked in on itself, forming a thin line as he saw the shame. A shame from both her, and a shame that she had taken on, assumed for him. "How you became one, yes." He said with as much seriousness he could gather. "But being one? You still are saving Humanity. Better than I could've."

"Anyone would've done the same." She told herself, looking down at the table, as if placing her words on it.

JD saw something else though. "Are… you okay with being a Spartan?"

She was a Spartan. Or was she Mai? Or were they two so irrevocably combined that it didn't matter. "I don't know anymore. I don't know."

To know, to feel, to be. Parts of the Human condition that screamed at him to approach. Sometimes people just needed to exist within those confines, even if it was painful, even if they didn't understand it. JD didn't need to understand why he had the inclination in his mind to take one of his hands and reach across the table and grab one of hers softly, to run his thumb across her knuckles instead as she had been doing to herself the entire time. That's what his mind told him what to do, and how nice it would've been to do it, but he didn't.

And Mai thought about how nice it would've been to remember her Mother, the ghosts of her fingers in her hair, running through dirty strands as she sang in a language she never knew, comforting her to sleep through hunger pains and cold. That touch, that warmth, she needed it, but it was not there for her today.

So Mai ran her fingers across the back of her knuckles, again and again, and JD returning to speaking sweet nothings of grandma's cooking as the two finished their meals in a comfortable silence.

* * *

On Altis. In midnight fog.

That late, the Alliance had been largely off the Savannah, not exactly wanting to stumble through a wreckage of a ship past midnight. It was fine by his count though. Less Covenant walking through his corridors, and largely, he had preferred that. Not that he had a choice nowadays.

Still, even he needed time to stretch his legs. Or, at least, he had made himself think to stretch his legs from his lonely podium on the bridge. He flickered to life, in white and in light, a glow coming over the bridge as he had manifest again on the holopedestal. For what he couldn't peg, but he hadn't enjoyed being this small if he had to project. He'd rather just keep tight, if that was the case, but this was the best he got nowadays.

He ghosted his fingers along the brim of his Stetson, taking a gander at the bridge. Not as if he hadn't already known the situation. This "Alliance" had been doing good to keep it proper, at least, but the amount of times they had tried to interface with it outright with their own data descriptors had been annoying. The Covenant hadn't offered when prompted, to hack it themselves, however they knew better.

How many of his brothers and sisters had blown the entire ship as Covenant raided its insides?

Far too many, and here? Things were much more complicated than that.

Out of habit, he had chewed again on a cigarillo, adjusting his poncho as he did one last overview. How very, very odd, he looked down between his boots, his spurs kicking against the "floor" of the holopedestal. The Covenant they hired to help them through this never outright told them what this was. What it meant. They must've known he had been in here.

Cabin fever had kept those mysteries in his head running. At least that one Jackal the Sara Ryder had been associated with had been missing as of late. He was the most curious one about it all. One day, when someone got lousy, he would jump into one of their wrist mounted computers, poke around their net, see what was really up with these humans. They certainly weren't UNSC, but that didn't mean that none had been there.

They spoke of them in hushed tones. Of the Spartan and the ODST. They were cooperating, with Shepard, due to come back to that planet soon, however he didn't know if he could personally stand to wait that long for answers.

Hastiness. Always hasty. He had cursed the man he had been before for being such. It meant that he still was.

Tomorrow though. There was always tomorrow, he thought, ramping up the brightness to his pedestal all the way to high before simmering back down, making sure the emitters weren't clogged or dusted up. His ship might've been 90% destroyed and being gutted, from the inside out, however he still had his standards as he shut off for the night, and waited for the right person.


	23. 1-17: Does this Unit have a Soul? Part I

A/N: Long story short: I am balls deep in work for this videogame I'm producing so I've been falling behind on updates. So sorry. Here's a thicc chapter though to compensate. We won't be spending much time on Feros, just a chapter after this and we're off.

Also hey it's 117.

* * *

1-17

Does this Unit have a Soul? Part I

* * *

Genocide. Massacre. The end of life itself. Shepard had seen what a glimpse, a slice, a part of it was like on Elysium as she saw the skies fall on them. All she had was a flannel on, a pistol taken from a dead officer as she looked behind herself and saw the militia and volunteers who had came for her for leadership. Men and women, mothers and fathers.

"We can't fall back! We can't let them know we're weak! We have to fight! We have to **KILL!"**

Her rallying speech had been the first true account of the public record of Commander Shepard, she screaming, with all her heart, behind the makeshift barricades of the colony before she had hopped over with a mass of civilian fighters into the first Batarian attack.

Kill or be killed, the beginning of the woman that would trace all the way into becoming Butcher.

Though this wasn't what she lived: when she went over, she didn't see Batarians and pirates. She saw machines. Figures of flesh and metal that she did not know what was what, combined into an unholy union that paused her as they walked toward her like the mutants of horror beyond her comprehension, opening fire.

She woke up to the gunshot she didn't remember in her memory: right in her forehead, blacking her out as she awoke in a snap on the bed of the Medbay, several monitoring stickers torn off of her as she threw herself to a sit immediately from laying back. A scream was held in the back of her dry throat as she remembered where she was.

Liara and Chakwas had been observing the monitors that Shepard had been attached to that day, a little more scientific inquiry prompted by Shepard herself about the dreams, the visions.

Every night, they'd get a little clearer, a little more concrete. It was hard to write off dreams when they played out the same, every night, and they showed her the same truths and revelations that had haunted her ever since Eden Prime. She'd see the exact damage of metal and flesh colliding forever, seeing the exacting detail of hows and horror. To see flesh disintegrate and replaced by the electrodes and wiring of an arcane mystery that had existed longer than time it felt like. To know something had been so permanent, so unstoppable, it was a truth she had to be reminded of almost every single night. Sometimes she wished the Batarians came back in her dreams.

No, she only got the end of civilization, and she had been helpless to stop it.

"Consistent." Chakwas commented in her usually dry voice.

It wasn't exactly in good morale for the crew to watch, in any capacity, Shepard go through her madness filled dreams, so the Medbay had been cleared for the period of the observation. She knew what it must've looked like to the rest of her men and women. That she really was going insane. She knew insanity though; knew it when Thresher Maws had eaten her squad whole and when the sky fell on Elysium. She was stronger than that, and surely, there was more credit to give her than just that.

Liara had tapped her omni several times before coming to the foot of the platform Shepard had been sleeping on. "Do you know that this isn't entirely unprecedented Shepard?"

Shepard sat up, hands rubbing down her forehead as Chakwas disconnected the nodes from her head. "There a support group for people who touch Prothean artifacts?"

Maybe Saren would've been there, she jested to herself. Liara just shook her head.

"Prothean cognition and memory technology is far beyond anything we can understand, but we know the principles of it. I personally know enough that it's not the method of transmission that is doing this to you but rather the content." She spoke politely, eyes darting between her omni and Shepard's face. "Your brain is being used as a storage drive, about. I suppose that each time it runs those memories back, your brain is acclimating, formatting almost to the exact specifications that knowledge needs to play out."

"Because that's what beacons are, right? Data drives essentially?" Liara nodded, flashing her omni away.

"Unfortunately, it's going to be nigh impossible to translate that data back to any of our interfaces, so, really, all we have is just your word."

Shepard had thought it easy enough to just explain that to the Council, to her crew even, but still it was outlandish, out there, especially when the visions were-

Lightning strike, through her temples. Worse than anything she had ever felt as far as a headache went. Her hand flew to the implant at the back of her head as it was concentrated there. It wasn't real pain, no; it was just realization, clarity in the form of cognition.

She struggled out to say as Chakwas rubbed her back easingly. "You're telling me that the Protheans were able to translate their own feelings into this data stream that's now in my head?"

Liara nodded again. "Prothean technology is very… non-mechanical, if that makes sense. The seamless integration and user interfaces toward organic forms essentially made the individual the interface unto themselves. Any present when Prothean technology is activated tend to be affected, or are able to interact with it to some degree. Like arcs of electricity, perhaps."

There was another set to her visions. One so much clearer, more distinct, and yet so much more mysterious. The image of that emblem: the eagle and world; an industrial hellscape dystopia she was chased through after witnessing an abduction from a literal black van.

It wasn't anything Prothean as far as she knew; no, it was a Human image, vision. She saw Humans in that vision. She knew it.

If the Prothean Beacon was able to transliterate memories into visions in her head, maybe, just maybe…

She had known Mai's strength only once applied to her, she trying to pull her down as the Beacon took her. She was taken too, held up, Shepard held as a conduit, a hinge, between her and the device.

"Are you feeling alright Shepard?" Liara asked again with a hint of concern, Shepard lost in her thoughts, her mental dictation of a mystery that was at the peripheral at her vision every time she saw Mai.

She shook her head. "Hah, yeah. I'm fine. Fine as anyone who's having apocalyptic visions are concerned."

Liara wasn't quite convinced. "Would you mind telling me what you saw this time then?"

Shepard told her then: Of an enemy, ground troops maybe of the Reapers. An organic-synthetic union that looked like the Husks they had encountered on Eden Prime. Grey, molting flesh bolstered by electronics. She saw Horror.

"Strange, that the Reapers would use ground troops if they are so omniscient." The Asari had noted quietly.

"Nothing beats boots on the ground, Liara." Shepard rolled her head along her shoulders, untightening them. "Wouldn't you agree?"

As was how she was pulled out of Therum in the first place. "I'm not a soldier, Shepard."

Chakwas had chuckled as she returned to her desk, thumbing in reports in the meanwhile. "Not many people in this galaxy are given the choice, Dr. T'Soni."

There was an apprehension again on Liara's lips as Shepard noticed, and it was something worth pressing. "How's self-defense training going? Been making time for it, right?" The Commander had asked, her voice turning into that of a commander. Liara had been tuned in immediately, dropping the positions of power.

She nodded once, "They've been having me do physical training first, making sure I know how to run and keep at it. It's, ah, quite a work out if I do say myself."

Chakwas scoffed, starting some of her more clerical work. "Just be glad that you are young enough to "keep at it", Dr. T'Soni."

In every aspect, Liara was the visage of a young woman, despite her species. Different than Tali, she wore her youth differently. She had already lived a life, however she had many lives to live. That was what her lifespan ordained to her, and, there was an inner thought she had on her own:

"I just didn't expect to fall into this particular line of work, so soon. I'm not a Commando."

The Asari Commandos, Shepard had known of them very well. A few applicants for the Joint Asari/Human Biotic integration units had been passed over by her, having served with some, and the bar had been high. Even at her very best, she was only as good as an Asari Commando on a bad day with their Biotics.

"Again, Liara, ain't asking you to fight, we just want to make sure you can."

And, in some sense, Shepard had wished Liara more: To see how far she could push herself.

"Well, thank you for that," Liara answered before rubbing the muscles on her side, letting loose a pained groan. "But I also do have to thank you for the sores. Even Tali knows how to throw a punch."

The fact that the Quarian had been throwing mean punches now it had risen some sort of concern, but Shepard wrote it off. "I've been meaning to get down there and do some personal PT with all of you, but, well, I think you know how busy I am. Still, I'll always enjoy some hands on time with my crew."

That had put an admittedly dumb smile on Liara's face at the thought. "Well, I'll look forward to it."

In that very same stroke however that smile had gone away. Shepard's Omni had flared. It was Pressly. "Ma'am," his voice came out of the device. "We need you on the bridge."

Shepard had given off a flashy, toothy grin. "Looks like we'll get hands on sooner than later."

Swinging her legs off the bed she had been out the door without a second to look back, leaving Liara simply tapping her finger against her cheek. "One would think having a record of the apocalypse on their mind would weigh a person down."

Chakwas had known better as she looked up from her console. "Perhaps." In what type of galaxy birthed a person like Shepard? Not a kind one, that she knew.

* * *

Her stride had been with purpose, a purpose that only the luckiest knew, holding her shoulders broad and her fists wound tight. When she arrived on the command deck she arrived as women of action always do: With gusto.

"Commander on deck!" Pressly had called for attention, harkening back to those old naval ways. She would always be a Marine first rather than a sailor, but some traditions were sacred among the order as she set up onto the command podium.

"Status report?"

Pressly had been at his station along the main navigation consoles, before that great holographic stream of the galactic map. It had once been pristine in its display, tasteful infographs highlighting systems and fleet formations of the Alliance, however that had all been sidelined by what had been essentially Shepard's marker notes, messily highlighting leads and planets of interest. Above that, one planet noted had rung out red, pulsing, asking for attention. She had known what it meant but Pressly had laid it out.

"QRF has been requested from Feros. It's something beyond their ability to handle."

Feros had been an interesting case study so far. It had asked for assistance from the Colonial Authority very early on against the Geth threat, hours after Eden Prime, however that assistance had been reeled back and asked for almost as if representative of the tides themselves. Inquiry and communication with the colony had been spotty, but what information could come out spoke to a bipolar colony that didn't know if they could handle the Geth on their own or not. Up until now, they did, the occasional Geth picket harassing them. Between that and their nature of being an Exo-Geni funded endeavor, the Alliance thus far had been cold to following through.

Though when QRF was signaled it had been a ultimatum. It truly meant help, in the more dire need.

Normally the Normandy had been excused from Alliance doctrine of answering QRFs so far, as painful as it had been. Its mission had been too important to be sidelined, however Feros had been different due to the very constant nature of the Geth constantly prodding at it. Why nothing had been done proactively had been a extension of caution: not wanting to kick the beehive with the Geth if a full intervention was put in place to dissuade. After all, if by way of observing the Geth's constant movements in regards to Feros, they could try and figure what had been going on with them hopefully.

Now was the time to less observe and more to kick in teeth, Shepard had decided. The former route the Normandy had been taking had been on the path of checking suspected Prothean points of interests along the Attican, chasing leads and misgivings from pirates or otherwise as requested by both Council and Alliance manifestations, however Feros would take precedent now.

"We have any idea what's going on?"

"No ma'am. All surveillance within Feros has gone dark," Pressly answered. "Seeing as the rest of the Navy has been hands off with Feros, we suspect the Geth knocked what satellites and comm buoys we had in system finally."

"Prior force estimates then?"

"Company strength observed overall," Pressly slid a report from the last report on Feros. "No Geth combat ships present, as far as anyone could tell. Alliance and Turian patrol fleets have kept Feros relatively isolated from the larger Geth movements in the Attican."

Prodding attacks, scout ships seen in one space lane or another, the Geth testing their feet in the wider galactic waters had been what had been happening outside of the Normandy's journey. The Alliance Fleet and the Turians upping patrols amidst heightening tensions with the Quarians and Covenant. Shepard knew Altis was playing host to an invasion fleet like the Galaxy had never seen, but for the meantime, it was Human and Turian mostly answering distress calls from mining facilities or colonies furthest out from Citadel space.

"Shame." Joker had said over the comms, even if he had technically been in the same room, just up further the nose. "The Normandy still needs to break in for ship-to-ship combat."

Shepard never enjoyed the notion of the Normandy going ship-to-ship. For as long as she had known outside of fighter-bomber doctrines, the Normandy was a particularly prototypical example of the glass cannon stereotype. She didn't want to be onboard if the Normandy took a hit. A ship designed for stealth would obviously have to sacrifice something, and she knew its torpedo and guns had been far beyond the capability of some destroyer-classes.

"Leave the fighting to me, Joker. Wouldn't want to mess with the Normandy's paint job."

"Well, fine by me. Only means your paying me to do half of what I'm trained for." All pilots needed a challenge, a fight; nothing as mundane as being a simple transporter for what had been the spearhead against a galactic threat. She sympathized with Joker at that moment, but her two halves had been fighting at that moment: between leveling with him and annoyance that he did want the Normandy to get into a fight.

She had her priorities, signaling to Pressly, a faint hand gesture sent his way. "Set course for Feros and drop a status update next comm buoy we hit."

Pressly himself had motioned to some of the navigation crew, they nodding and affirming as the adjustments were made to the current navigation data. "Aye ma'am. ETA three hours."

With a nod Shepard spoke into her omni. "Joker, activate the stealth drive. We're going dark. If this is some ploy to get us out in the open, we'll do it on our terms."

"Roger dodger ma'am."

"Pressly, you have the con."

"Yes ma'am."

The VI of the Normandy affirmed as Shepard had summoned the intercom to her omni, she speaking into it again as soon as it was finished. "This is CO Shepard to all away team personnel. QRF to Feros has been called. All hands, we are Red-Con 1. Marines, gear up immediately. Briefing in the Well Deck in ten."

Marines on the crew deck not predisposed to security had rushed down the stairs, the entire Normandy abuzz now with movement as over half of its crew had made its way down the decks, those sleeping spurred from their rest as the call was made. The pomp of power, the wealth of military, and all that war err gave had manifested in Shepard as she felt that same electric feeling of command and military.

She too had stepped away to go down to the Well Deck, but not before stopping by the Medbay on her way down. The door had already been open, one of the Hitmen already halfway out: Doc. "Commander." He nodded at her, a satchel of supplies in hand. "See you down there."

The Commander had given the combat medic a nod as he disappeared into the elevator, being held open by other Marines.

Chakwas had rose her eyebrow as Shepard stepped in, almost jealous. "Commander? Take care of her, shall you? Dr. T'Soni is quite reliable company."

"I'll see if I can squeeze her in with the twenty-something other Marines I got."

Chakwas had chuckled as she twirled over in her seat and desk, getting ready for the inevitable combat injury reports that were to come of this. QRF reactions were hardly bloodless, if ever. Liara herself had been holding a clipboard by her own terminal, staring at Shepard, unsure, but knowing what was to come. The Commander had only casually walked over despite all the energy in the air. "Shepard?" Liara asked up, staring at her.

"Doing something?" She gestured at her typing.

Liara had grimaced once before smiling sweetly up at her new Commander. "Writing my will."

A huff of air through Shepard's nose. She didn't know if it had been a joke or not.

Reaching a hand out she had done nothing but pat her shoulder, coaxing the Asari up. "We'll set you up with some light armor and a sidearm, but when we hit the ground, don't worry. I've got Marines for a reason."

The inevitability that she was to participate in a military operation had been palpable, the anxiety in her shoulders Shepard felt. Still she was nothing but encouraging, if not for Shepard but for herself. "It's certainly an opportunity. Exo-Geni never cleared Asari researchers to get this close." There was a hint of cautious optimism in Liara then, but perhaps it was a front, put up for Shepard.

"I don't expect you to fight, nor do I want you to," Shepard continued. "But if push comes to shove, follow our lead."

"Keep my head down, I presume?"

"And don't get in the way." It was such a hostile statement Shepard had been surprised she had said it all, even with her own motherly tones, but it came out with the necessity of breath. It surprised her, but there was always a reason why. Shepard had herself pretty well figured out at this point in her life, as best she could determine. How many of her people died because they couldn't keep up with her? Fumbled as they tried to follow her stride?

Somehow Liara had extrapolated this, the way her eyes widened, the way she bit the bottom of her lip. It was very much a warning to her that she understood in one timid nod.

* * *

He woke up as men of action always due: with a call to that action.

_"This is CO Shepard to all away team personnel. QRF to Feros has been called. All hands, we are Red-Con 1. Marines, gear up immediately. Briefing in the Well Deck in ten."_

JD had caught Shepard's announcement over the intercom as he looked up from his mid-nap daze, Mai already stepping over him as she had crouched down into her armor's storage, her gaze cast at him, seeing him awake.

"Gear up." She said simply, as if he had missed.

"Yep. Ya." He nodded, shaking himself awake as he palmed himself up, almost rolling over to his locker as he had donned his own armor and gear in record time. His BDU jumpsuit he had practically slid in after so much practice. He didn't take much care to take off the hardened alloy parts of the armor from the jumpsuit, the pauldrons, pads, and such, reaching to his sides to sip and seal it before his helmet had gone on.

It was odd, perhaps, that he hadn't developed much sentimental value to the whole affair, this was, after so many years, only his third armor set. Though he had done well enough to keep it going, even now. The fact that the Alliance had retrofitted barriers and even some medigel dispersion system to it had only given him utility that he wished all ODSTs had gotten.

Naturally he had gone to Mai after he had slid on his helmet, she already settling up with the armor on her top half, leaving JD to kneel before her and clamp her armor pieces down on her lower section. It was a routine now.

One that, under any other pretense, was awkward. A pretense that had been quickly dissipating.

"How much time do you save by having me do this as well?" He had locked in the armor piece at the base of her spine.

Mai slid on her helmet as the two reconvened in a stand, the bulk of her Spartan-ness assumed once again. She considered for a moment. "Enough time."

At some point she had gotten their two weapons respectively, she passing his SMG along to him.

"Huh. Right."

The Normandy Well Deck had been something to see, when brought to full readiness, every locker thrown open and gear put on as was typical of QRF functions. Mai and JD had done their research. QRF in this galaxy had been the same in their own; if anything, JD had been supremely familiar. ODSTs were often attached to QRF missions where speed was of the essence and landing zones needed to be established for colonists to evacuate. That's where he and the ODSTs came in.

Still, despite whatever moto shit was said, the technicality of their existence meant this:

There wasn't just one Marine Corps.

There had been enough of Hitman already in the Well Deck, but when the mass of the rest had come from the elevator, so began the cadence that JD had recognized, kicked off by Emerson.

_Mama, Mama, can't you see?_

_(Mama, Mama, can't you see?)_

_What this Corps has done for me?_

_(What this Corps has done for me?)_

A platoon's worth of Marine Raiders starting a singing cadence had activated some indoctrinated part of JD, the need to move hitting his legs. He wouldn't be as degraded to start jogging in place, but that would've hit his spot as Hitman piled in and started opening their lockers, dawning their gear and armor.

_Put me in a barber's chair_

_(Put me in a barber's chair)_

_Snip, snap and I had no hair_

_(Snip, snap and I had no hair)_

_And if I die in a combat zone_

_(And if I die in a combat zone)_

_Box me up and ship me home!_

_(Box me up and ship me home!)_

"We're lucky, Mai." JD spoke softly.

"Hm?" The Spartan turned to him as they waited by the Mako, looking at the gear up go on.

"Same galaxy, same Marine Corps." Same Humanity, same everything at times. Mai supposed that there was comfort in it.

_Put me in a set of Dress Blues_

_(Put me in a set of Dress Blues)_

_Comb my hair and shine my shoes_

_(Comb my hair and shine my shoes.)_

_Pin my medals upon my chest_

_(Pin my medals upon my chest.)_

_Tell my Mama I did my best_

_(Tell my Mama I did my best)_

There was much enthusiasm to Hitman's singing as Tali and Garrus had appeared from the elevator and core respectively, taken aback by the entire show, unsure if they had wanted to intrude on the entire affair. Wrex had been less than caring as he appeared behind Tali, only to wedge his way into the Marine mass and simply grab his shotgun. It was all he needed, personally.

Ashley and Kaiden had appeared soon after. For Ashley, she had settled right in, belting out the same cadence as Kaiden went to open his mouth. Perhaps it was to stern, to speak against this scene, but he snapped up. There was no real use, a mental shrug on his shoulders as he put on his armor.

_Mama, Mama dont you cry_

_(Mama, Mama dont you cry)_

_Marine Corps motto is "Do or Die!"_

_(Marine Corps motto is "Do or Die!")_

"Keelah…" Tali had appeared next to Garrus as they awaited, touching his elbow gingerly.

"Show offs." The Turian scoffed for the sake of his own military.

It's not as if they were unwelcome as a whole as Loke had caught Tali and Garrus standing asides, she motioning them over for them to gear up, and they did, getting caught up in the wave of Marines. There was a certain empowering feeling that washed over the Quarian, being among men and women of action, doing what they did best in their life. How easy, how used they were to gearing up, making sure their armor configurations and helmets snapped on tight as they placed their ID tags across their backs. In a fireteam that big it was needed:

Loke, Emerson, Bannon, Harris, Lamareux, Anne… The names went on and on, and if Mai and JD weren't already acquainted, they had found the names of Hitman all spelled out on their backs.

The miracle of it being that Shepard needed no such tagging as she appeared out of the elevator, a Liara T'Soni in her shadow.

"Commander on deck!"

Every soldier their had snapped together, at attention, Shepard giving a formal salute down as she found her locker. "At ease. We geared up?!"

"Yes ma'am!"

Or currently trying. Kaiden had appeared next to her, already in his kit as he looked over Liara, who followed, unused to being surrounded by so many people that looked like they could kill her. "Orders, Commander?"

She had been half-way zipped up in her own black armor plates as she answered. "School circle." She told Kaiden.

"School circle!" He echoed out, automatically the Marines forming around Shepard and her locker, even Mai and JD coming over by beckon.

Shepard had started almost immediately, throwing up her omni and sending the mission info to all. "As I said, we got QRF request from Feros. Don't know why they'd taken to holding off on calling it in, but they've pulled the trigger and now we're shooting, oorah?"

"Oorah." The entire Marine complement had rattled off.

"We've been ignoring QRFs up and down the Attican ma'am, what makes Feros special?" Hitman as a whole spoke for each other, one voice was as good. That was their unit cohesion. Shepard had known it well. On crews she had been in command with before it got to the point where her voice did speak for them all out of trust.

She answered the voice. "Feros is different. For some reason or another the Geth keep sticking around this place, and now they've made a substantial attack against the colony."

"What's our prerogative ma'am?" Emerson asked aloud, bypassing Kaiden.

"Our prerogative," Kaiden answered for Shepard, "Is the civilian livelihood."

Shepard could only affirm. She liked to see this friction between Kaiden and Emerson, secretly. For as much as an empath Kaiden had been, he was still supposed to be a Marine. This was part of it.

"Affirmative." Shepard backed up. "However," she knelt down, throwing her omni up only to transmit it to the omnis of each Marine and ground team member there. "Once the situation is stabilized, we go hunting as well. If the Geth have found what they're looking for, so should we."

"For what, then, ma'am?" It was Ashley's time to speak up, but Shepard didn't answer.

"Artifacts or data stores similar to the Prothean Beacon." Liara answered, still in her uniform, so soft compared to everyone around her. This was her area of expertise. "If what happened on Eden Prime correlates directly toward their intention of securing a Prothean device, then we can expect the same here."

"Respectfully Doc," Bannon spoke up referring to Liara, her voice so very distinct compared to the American-accents that had rounded out the translators and the crew. "I don't think I could tell what a Prothean artifact would look like, and if I do, well, I ain't exactly in the mood to get mindfucked like the good Commander, ya?"

Shepard laughed it off once, harshly. "Well, that's why she's coming with us. Feros is a former Prothean ecumenopolis."

There was a light of familiarity, at least, with Hitman for Liara. The graces of Ryder had been with them, so she felt at ease with them in such a sense that what had happened next hadn't been too radical: Chief Weston had taken out an armor case and a pistol.

"All ready when you want, ma'am." He nodded at her, "I recommend."

"As do I." Shepard affirmed.

There was an anxiety as Liara looked down on the crate, seeing it open and the plates of armor so like those that the Marines wore on them. Kaiden had touched upon her shoulder once. "Haven't taught you much, Doc, but it should be enough. Long as you stay behind us that is."

Mai and JD had bore witness to the first uneasy trials for Liara, before Hitman and Kaiden, trying to gauge what would she need to be trained for to keep up. The same process that played out for Tali had been enacted on Liara, the distinct issue being that Tali had been born with a hatred for Geth. Liara? Not so much. She wasn't a fighter, and it showed as she used her Biotics to try and throw some of those who had been training her for practice; it showed in the way she fumbled with a handgun.

JD had heard Garrus mumble to him, witnessing all of it: _"Amateur."_

"Stay behind Chief Gul, she got enough room for ya." A voice from the crowd, and Mai had actually affirmed as well in a nod, silent as she was.

She had been almost as much of an enigma to the Asari as the Protheans had been, some untouchable being whose even its allies stayed away from as if radiating a bad aura. To be fair, how could she not give off such an impression?

It was the first time since Therum that Liara had looked up and down Mai, seeing the monster more made of mental than man look at her too, and in her black visor she saw a starless sky.

She had jumped when Tali had ribbed her. "Hey, the first drop is always the hardest." Behind her own purple visor she had winked at the good doctor. "Could be fun."

"That what you been having? Fun? When I send you out there?" Shepard shook her head in a half-disappointed swagger. Tali had shrugged in jest, a shotgun slung over her shoulders in short order. Garrus had had that sympathetic look to his face plates. He knew in some piece of himself that they, they as aliens, were in over their heads on that ship. It wasn't as if they had a choice, whether or not they did want to be here. The galaxy needed them to be there.

"If I can choose to feel anything out there, shooting pyjacks, I choose fun." Wrex had been more than receptive, backing Tali up. The way he had added to her training, her drills, it spoke to a Krogan right: the right of pain. Of anyone in that galaxy the Krogan had been able to claim pain itself as their defining trait, given to them by the circumstances of long-ago history placed onto their very genes. The Quarians were the runner-ups, and Wrex say that in Tali as he had punched her down one day, dead center of her chest.

_"Do you know what it's like to keep fighting? Even after taking the hardest hit in your life?" He told her as she coughed up into her throat, feeling as if something was broken inside of her, crawling back as Wrex approached on the training mat. The Marines watched. JD and Mai had looked on. Garrus was nowhere to be seen._

_She could not say anything as her voice was robbed from her, Wrex's shadow cast on her._

_"Do you know what it feels like to fight against everything?" He said again, reaching down, grabbing her legs, and throwing her onto the otherside of the mat. "One day you're gonna get hit in combat, and whoever the enemy is, they won't be as nice as me."_

_Mai's eyes glazed over as her own memory of Onyx came forth: How she became the entire class's mortal enemy, and they were told to try and take her down. How many did she fight off? What did Kurt think when she did stand alone, remaining where all else failed?_

_Tali landed on her stomach, crawling again away from the monster._

_"You think they're gonna just let you crawl away, welp?!"_

_She rolled over onto her back, reaching down to her boot, an item there that people had forgotten: A knife had been drawn as she pointed it at Wrex._

_He smirked._

_"Do you even know what you're doing with that thing?"_

_That thing; knives. He glanced at Mai, knowing that of anyone there she had been the most qualified. Even then and there there was still a dare of a challenge._

Wrex had placed his hand upon Tali's shoulder and she had seemed comfortable with it, of all things.

"What's up with the colony itself?" Another Hitman had asked. "They alive?"

Shepard nodded fiercely. "Out of comms, but presumed currently engaged."

"They Alliance or Private?"

As was always the nuance with the colonies.

"A corp called Exo-Geni has headed the colonization effort here. You know how it is: first come, first serve, and they make the bet that if the planet has any particular resources they're entitled to it." Shepard responded with a certain irk. "Dr. T'Soni, you would be better disposed to talk about Feros, actually."

And that Liara had been as she stepped up. "As we stated, Feros was a Prothean world to the highest degree. Its surface covered completely by the Prothean civilization in both infrastructure and, unfortunately, dilapidation given the rot of the planet. Given the structural decay and latent radiation given off by the ruins, settlement here was, and still is, inadvisable, as only the larger towers peek above the toxic dust clouds."

"You ever been, T'Soni?" Emerson asked in turn. Always focused on the particular details of a mission like any good Marine Raider.

She shook her head sadly. "Alliance permissions for Prothean worlds has always been… stringent, especially when it came to privatized colony worlds."

"Well, now's your chance." Shepard had decided. "Saren wants something here, and he's sent the Geth for it. Pay him back for Eden Prime."

"Oorah." The crowd had resounded.

"Good. Now standby. We'll see what our insertion options are and then it's point and shoot."

* * *

Shepard amongst her men had been a moralizing feel. Of the many Extranet articles on her, one had been an interview from a Marine that had once been in her fireteam:

_"Being asked to go out on a mission with the Commander? It was if I was being asked to be the 13_ _th_ _ Apostle!"_

Stick with Shepard and you'd be alright, that was the feeling JD had gotten with Shepard, though he had been wary of it. How many times had he felt that sense of security with dead ODST sergeants?

One time too many.

Mai at least never trusted anyone to lead. No one that hadn't been a Spartan that is.

That was just how she operated. So, it left the two naval SOF off to the side as usual, waiting for the three hours that it would've taken to get to Feros to pass.

"I prefer Chess." Shepard declared, invited to a little waiting game of Poker by the Marines.

"Aw, come on Skip, it's nice playing a game where luck is involved." Ashley had basically bullied the Commander into sitting as the two sat across each other in that circle, surrounding an overturned locker used as a table.

"Because we're the monument to good luck, right Williams?"

"We make our own!" At that moment Ashley had a winning hand, slapped down onto their table as those playing had all given out a roar of displeasure.

With Shepard, every moment, looking from the outside in, or the inside out, it felt like a moment in time, in history. A photo taken then and there might've ended up in the history books.

No wonder that those that found themselves outside of that circle had been like Liara: In over their head and not sure of what to do yet, dragging an armored case, approaching the two spooks.

Garrus and Tali had found their place besides Mai and JD, or, at least more specifically, JD, leaning against the Mako or sitting against the tires. There they had their quiet chattering, looking on at what Human Marines were like in those precious moments before deployment. In short, as Tali observed, they didn't look like they knew what was coming.

"You tend to, after a certain time, not worry about what you're gonna get sent into. It's really not worth it." Garrus wiped the scope of his sniper rifle down with a fiber cloth. Shepard had asked him to bring a long gun, and so he would.

"Really now?" Tali leaned her head over, tapping his shoulder with the rim of her helmet.

Garrus could only nod. "Whatever happens to you, happens. No use worrying about it."

Each day, without fail, JD had liked Garrus more and more. To think this was how he was going to get acclimated into a galaxy with aliens that weren't Covenant; it was too perfect.

Perhaps it helped that some of those aliens had looked Human. That was why he had seen the pensive look on Liara's face as he approached him. "Hello."

JD had lifted his hands from resting on his gun, a light wave. Letting the armored case down at her feet she turned over to Mai, she standing rigid in the shadow of the Mako's rear section. "I've been advised to hide behind you, if there is any fighting." Liara's timidness had only intensified as she had approached Mai. Through the glint of his visor Garrus had caught the feeling Liara felt.

"She really catches up to ya, if you're not prepared." He mumbled, putting asides his sniper rifle and crossing his arms, leaning back against the Mako and looking up at the Normandy's dark ceiling. "I don't know how JD does it, truthfully."

"Neither do I." JD had been surprised Garrus had coaxed out some banter from him. He had also been surprised he heard the way Mai's tech suit had sounded when she turned her head to look at him, her head tilted. Garrus and Tali had been surprised when Mai's helmet depolarized, showing her face behind it. Such technology hadn't yet been common place amongst helmets that were standard issue in the galaxy. As for why she did it, Mai had spoken in that peculiar shared language, looking at JD. Some signs were facially bound. More common place in Japanese Sign Language he personally knew, but in ASL it had their place, especially when she had scrunched the bridge of her nose and her eyebrows and gave her head a little shake.

HUH?

She had taken the banter literally. It hurt her in some small way, at least, and JD hoped he was reading her right. He shook his head defensively as he brought his right hand to his chest before wiping the heel of his left palm along his right index finger.

I JOKE.

Had she been taught that sign yet? It crossed JD's mind as she rose an eyebrow and held it. It wasn't as if humor or comedy had been a particular part of their articulation and education so far, past that one moment of reflection on the cuteness of girls.

In light of this he had simply finger spelled the word JOKE out.

The particular fluentness of JD's hand had been still enthralling, and fingerspelling, in its stride, had been complicated at its face to the uninitiated, of which everyone else were.

"They do that." Garrus had explained as frankly as he could. "Even though verbal communication probably would be more convenient, faster, etcetera etcetera." Garrus hadn't known why JD had known. Mai wouldn't forgive his ignorance however, not as that death glare cut through the polarized visor and Garrus had remembered why the helmet was for as much his protection as it was hers.

JD shook it all off, head tipped at Liara. "We'll take care of you, don't worry. We all will."

How soft his speaking voice was, Liara had noticed after the sparse interactions they did have so far. It was a nice voice, but it reminded her of Matriarchs who had spent centuries in solitude.

"Well, I'm glad to hear." She croaked out, the zip of Mai's visor polarizing again heard and tensing Liara again for a moment. "I was also wondering if, if you could, helping me into this armor…?"

It had partly been because he had been seen helping Mai into her armor that Liara had looked at JD specifically as she asked. The rest was out of logical deduction between the Quarian, Turian, and whatever Mai had been. It was no matter however; he had known how to put on regular Alliance armor. It reminded him of suits that firefighters put on back on Luna, and, in any case, he had been fitted for some armor in case of his BDU's own failure. As versatile as the ODST BDU was, it hadn't been the same piece of work as Mai's own. Inevitability would eventually dictate when he would stop wearing the skin of another life. If anything, this current BDU had lasted longer than any set he had before. The Kinetic Barriers had seen to that.

"It's ah, pretty simple Doctor T'Soni." JD had rigidly said, unsure. "You have to get down to your skinnies if you don't have a standard Alliance uniform on tap." She didn't.

"I- uh, would like some help regardless. This gear is borrowed and I don't want to damage it." She said slowly.

In the back of his head ODST squadmates in deployments past had been chiding him. Helping a woman into a suit of armor by stripping down? A fantasy played out. And it wasn't as if he personally was blind to Liara's Asari-typical looks. Very appealing to the Human imagination with its natural curves, seen even through the lab uniform she had borrowed from Chakwas.

"I have a partner," Liara had been confused at JD's admittedly awkward wording, glancing at Mai as the shock trooper immediately reeled back. "I mean, ah, a girlfriend, back home. I wouldn't feel comfortable doing it."

"Spirits, he's whipped." Garrus thought he was being sneaky as he whispered in Tali's ear, she eliciting a giggle, and then a moment of disappointment.

"That gonna be your excuse for everything, JD?" Tali poked at him verbally. He had shrugged, Tali shaking her head in exasperation and pushing herself off the ground. "Come on, Doctor T'Soni, I'll help you."

"Ah, just Liara if you may."

The two women had disappeared behind the Mako with the case. Mai had been as much of a privacy curtain as any as they moved behind her.

"You got a picture of her that you look at at night?" Garrus broke the cushion of sounds that came behind them all, of Liara disrobing and Tali trying to figure out what from what on an Alliance standard issue armor. JD looked over at him, not a word said, giving nothing but a blank visor. "Sorry. A lot of Human war movies have this scene where one of the tragic characters looks at a photo of their love before doing something stupid, _or dying_."

JD deadpanned even more than usual. "You believe everything you see in movies?"

"Well the first propaganda films from the First Contact War told me all Humans do was kill each other and expand. And they showed it in my history class, so yeah, maybe."

Inwardly Mai had remembered that part of being a Spartan: Of being a symbol. She never was the subject of the UNSC propaganda machine, but she had seen their results. Posters of their helmets, beckoning men and women of action into war, promising a future if it was fought for. To stand for Humanity was to stand with the Spartans; the unkillable soldiers. Just thinking about it left a bad taste in her mouth.

"Yeah, I've got a picture." JD thumbed back behind him. "In my locker."

"I'll show you my last partner if you show me yours." Garrus asked steadily.

It was certainly a request. "We that close now, Garrus?" JD tilted his heat at him.

He held up one hand defensively. "I just want to know what an attractive Human female looks like by your mark. I trust your judgement. It's not like I'm gonna steal it and go to a corner somewhere and, uh, do my business."

Fair, JD thought, shaking his head. It only affirmed to him that Garrus did, at some point, serve on a ship and all it entailed. His looser squadmates had taken turns sharing dirty photos sent over by their partners. The Turians had been no different it seemed.

"Yeah, yeah. I'll go get it after they're done-"

"Ah no rush. Just was curious, ever since Tali learned you were taken she's been gushing to me about what type of woman would have you." This time it had been Mai that tilted over to look at Garrus. She wouldn't dare say anything but the fact she moved had said enough. "Said you reminded her of one of the Marines she grew up with on the Flotilla, strong and quiet type. Apparently, those are popular but I don't see it."

"Well you're neither or."

"Oh, you pain me Durante."

Mai looked away, seeing the two lapse into banter. JD had never sounded like that with her. Perhaps it had been something that was distinct with being born to police, or perhaps it had been some masculine bond; whatever it was, it seemed normal. She wasn't.

"That really how Tali read me? Strong and silent?" JD had said, quieter, trying to make sure said Quarian couldn't hear.

Garrus had taken a beat, mouth open, but no sounds. JD had found out why as he found said woman in front of him as he looked away, leaning with her arms akimbo. Even behind that smoky visor there had been an eyebrow raised.

"Also nosy." The ting of her fingers flicking against his visor had been like a coin drop, JD recoiling ever so slightly as he had allowed it to pass. "Now how'd I do?"

The standard base layer configuration of an Alliance infantry armor had been more body suit than armor and kit, meant more for mechanics or second-line troops. It would protect against shrapnel, but without barriers, gunshots wouldn't be reliably protected from. The darker sheen of it had matched Kaiden's armor in a way, giving her contrast from her blue skin.

"Lighter than I expected." Liara had twisted her body around, trying to find some point of stiffness.

"The Humans usually have some small exo-skeleton built into their armor. Doesn't really improve strength, but it balances out the weight of that whole deal… Least what they told me at my military academy." Garrus commented, standing up, using his sniper rifle as a crutch for a moment, looking her up and down. "Not bad, Dr. T'Soni." It wasn't surprising. Asari and Human evolutionary development had been a fluke, given their similarities.

In Tali's hand had been Liara's pistol, but she had been hesitant, offering it up to JD. "You're good at this. How about you, you know, give her the rundown?"

JD nodded promptly, taking the gun offered.

M3 Predator. Typical light pistol.

He weighed it in his hand a few times. Not that he had known much of civilian firearm ownership in this universe, but back home as he knew, the M6 had become the standard model both in and out of the service.

The number of weapons being bounced around here hadn't been as uniform. Benefits of the lack of wartime necessity creating efficient production lines.

"No training?" JD asked.

She shook her head as he approached. "No."

Asari Commando units had been galaxy famous, Mai recounted as Liara stuck in her shadow unwittingly. "Your mother didn't teach you?"

There was a hint of suspicion behind that.

Liara had kept shaking her head, view gazing down. "My mother was never… the teaching type. To me at least. Even when I was born she was a Matriarch, preoccupied with her dealings. I had nannies, assistants, none would even think to teach me how to shoot a gun."

Mai remembered her cover story: An orphan abandoned on a ship. Yet the truth of it had been she had a mother. Her Mother. What did she teach her?

How to survive? How to exist? How to persist?

How much of that was Ambrose and Mendez, and how much of that was the woman they took her from?

Mai had held her rifle a little more rigidly, looking away, wondering why she had asked at all.

There wasn't much for JD to teach Liara, not when it was clear her role: not to get into a fight. Sights, how to aim, safety, cool-down, things of that nature. This was not a woman who had been aiming to fight, this was a woman who had to fight as a last resort. Then again so was he, in a way.

Liara had slid the pistol onto a holster at her belt, magnetically locked. "Thank you, Chief Durante."

He nodded. "JD. Just JD."

"We're lucky," Liara had started as JD turned away. "That we're fighting the Geth."

"Hm?" Tali had poked her head around, taken away from a quiet whisper of nothings with Garrus. That magic word had always piqued her interest.

"It wouldn't be the same as shooting something that's alive."

"What do you mean, Liara?" The Quarian had asked, unsure if her translator was getting across right. In Quarian tongue it sounded very similar to something so ingrained in history, she thought it intentional. A long time ago, before the suits, before the fleet, before the great exodus and the galactic shame, it is recounted that what would become the Geth asked this:

_Does this unit have a soul?_

"The Geth are artificial. Synthetic. I suppose even if they are what we think of as alive, they're not alive. Like us."

Tali scrunched her eyes. "Well they aren't at all."

"I- uhm." The assuredness in her voice, it made Liara quiver for a moment. "It's just musings. Yes. I'm just musing. I've never taken a life before. And with my reading on the Covenant recently, I suppose I have a recent idea based on faith and the spiritual."

Tali had soured internally at the idea of the Covenant. She wasn't particularly religious herself, but just thinking about how theological the Covenant had been was, if anything, sickening to her.

Garrus had usually sharp eyes, a sharp face, his species descended from that of raptors and birds of prey. When his eyes had gone soft it meant something. "It's not something you plan for. Dr. T'Soni."

Tali remembered how she had gotten onto the Citadel, finding a moment of safety before finding Dr. Michel. She had been tracked by Saren's assassins, and she had made a trap for them inside of a trash incinerator. The way she killed them, how they melted, she felt okay with it despite the brutality. It was her only choice. "If it happens, it happens. Don't let it bother you."

"Maybe it should bother you if it doesn't." JD had meant to say that much quieter, hoping that a roll of cheers from the poker game would hide it, but nothing could get away from Mai or the Turian right in front of him.

"You good?"

Garrus had reached out, touching JD's arm for a moment, the minute jerk of Mai's arm toward his direction unconsciously making him back away.

There was less ambiguity with the Covenant on whether or not they had been alive or not. Sure, their relentless drive had been drone like, mechanical, but at the end of the day their war was that of faith. They had faith, they had belief, they were as alive and in touch with the notion of their own mortal souls to be in service to it all. They were sentient beings with as much of a range of emotions as him. He couldn't hide behind that alien idea of them anymore. Not when they had been here, not when they had been perfectly capable of interacting with that new galaxy, same as him.

He didn't regret the hundreds of Grunts, dozens and dozens of Elites and Brutes he had gunned down.

The only thing he regretted, then and there, is that it had made killing Humans as readily doable by him.

"First time it happened to me. I was ambushing the enemy. They had no chance. It was orders." He said quick, fast, didn't want to hold it within him to stew and make him mysterious. Not when it was toward a man who had been a detective. "Tali's right, it just happens." He gestured a finger at the Quarian. "Yeah, just happens." he said quietly.

"It's better if you hate the enemy." Mai had looked away at some unknowable something, out toward the door to engineering. At first the three of them had wondered if she had said anything at all, but she turned her head back over. "If they deserve it, then you're just making things right."

Garrus had sniffed, looking down at his sniper rifle. If he stuck as a military man he would've been fast tracked to sniper. He was that good. "I don't think so, Chief Gul."

"Do you?" To be questioned by a Spartan, by someone who had been so sure of what it meant to kill, it had made Garrus waver. Though this was different. This wasn't empirical. This was what he believed as he sucked in the spit between his fangs and nodded at her.

A common thread had come up: survival, or orders.

"My first missions were S&Ds of Batarian outposts, often times the Turian Navy would just send fireteams out with no support and told to do what they could. More efficient that way, helped give troops experience they said… But I'll tell you, I might've had orders to kill, but really, when you were all alone on a dusty rock in the middle of nowhere, with half your squad injured and the other half shell shocked, you're killing to survive, not because you were ordered to."

"Even with Batarians? Even with Turian Mercs?" Mai questioning had been new to everyone.

Garrus had surprised himself with how fast he shook his head.

"I didn't kill with my orders because I hated the enemy, Chief Gul." Garrus had twitched his facial plates for a moment, grinding his jaws. "I could've been a pirate, in another life. I can't think of those who chose that life too lowly, not if they didn't have a choice. Chances are if we're fighting, we never had the choice to do so."

To read Mai's silence was a skill. One that JD alone had barely attained.

The silence she spoke that day, looking at Garrus, it had been that of confusion. She turned away.

"I see." Leaving her mouth, remembering her missions; so many. So many people. So many killed. How many deserved it?

* * *

Most of the time, QRF responses were full of, usually, Makos being dropped from the sky amidst gunfire and explosions, Marines rushing out from the well decks of ships as they raced to save the day.

As with all things when it came to Shepard, this wasn't it.

No Geth ships in atmosphere. No unified colonial traffic control. No radio going off the hook screaming for help. Just the silence of the Normandy skirting over the dead world.

This galaxy had offered questions that JD couldn't begin to comprehend of his own, answered only by the Covenant of all people. Had there been a Prothean-type civilization before Humanity? As the Covenant had now answered, translated and all, explained in their press releases, yes. The Covenant had been chosen by the Forerunners, the ones who had built the foundations of the Galaxy.

The Forerunners, at least to him, hadn't been as readily known to Humanity at least then the Protheans. He had only known of the Forerunners through reading up on the Covenant's public releases. The fact that this galaxy had used the Relays to start off had meant everything.

Still, looking down on an entire world: dead, maybe Shepard's visions had a point.

Maybe there was something out there, ready to reap.

The entire Marine contingent of the Normandy had been brought up to the Command Deck, because, as it turned out-

"Apparently they've got a landing space big enough for the Normandy to proceed with regular docking procedures." Pressly had reported.

"Gotta love the private sector." Joker had been leaning up out of his seat a bit, peering out the windows at the sky scrapers that had risen to the Normandy's flight altitude in atmosphere, rolling clouds offering only peeks at the city beneath. "Always gotta make things easy."

That many people up their people had been squeezing by to get through, though if it meant coming out fast, it was tolerated as Marines and guests stood in a line, with Shepard and Liara at the front by Joker, the rest having started the line at the airlock.

Where the colony was had been relatively indistinct according to the Colonial Authority, but it hadn't been anything the crew had been unprepared for.

"We've triangulated where this colony is." One of the sensory officers on the Command Deck rattled off. "Joker, you've got your coordinates."

"Thank you, Mike." The pilot had rattled off teasingly, the entire Normandy doing an abrupt turn over port.

Even with the inertial dampeners there was some sway to it. Only Mai had felt it coming, her boots magnetizing as every other person on the deck had shifted a foot over. A very predictable outcome given how many people were standing.

Joker gestured at an imaginary something above him. "Seat belt sign was on, people. Your fault for not listening."

_"Fuck off Joker." _A Marine had yelled out from the back, only fueling his short laugh.

Shepard had only patted his chair as Liara had been off her feet and on the arm of the copilot seat. She he had actually apologized for. "Sorry about that. Wasn't meant for you. Just had to remind the ground pounder who's really in charge here."

_"I'll beat your crippled fucking ass you cunt! You're gonna be shitting broken bones next time I get to ya!"_

Liara wasn't entirely convinced by it all, but it wasn't for her to question as Shepard reached a hand out, pulling her up. "ETA Joker?" The Commander asked, ignoring what he had just pulled.

"Now."

"Oh alright then." Alenko had been one of the first lined up, ready to head out, Shepard's hand signaling him. "Lieutenant Alenko, you're on point with Hitman, secure the colony and we'll call it from there." Kaiden had nodded, affirming, arms crossed and ready. Shepard had only then moved to look at the special guests who had been relatively off to the side, still braced in case Joker had done another hijinks. Only Wrex had been intractable, unbothered. "As for the VIPs, you're with Chief Gul and Chief Durante for now." As what everyone who hadn't been Alliance military had been called: VIPs.

"Came with you to fight, Shepard." Wrex drawled out. "Not to follow."

"One step at a time, Wrex."

The Normandy had shifted down, the reverse Gs of it lowering, the great shadow of a tower above them. Joker had easily slid her into a landing port. He was disappointed with it, raising his arms into the air. "Really? My first QRF mission and all I get is this?"

The docking clamps around the Normandy had slid into place as if he was in another other Alliance shipyard or space station.

"Yep. That's it Joker… Pressly!"

"Aye ma'am!?" he yelled from the back.

"You have the con!"

The doors to the Normandy's airlock had unlocked at that moment, and suddenly all the Marines had went gun up. Ready, even when in the belly of their own ship.

"Airlock access is clear." Hitman's pointwoman Loke had rung out, the ship's docking point open and revealing the stony access way on Feros. The ship's VI had been screaming for both redundant doorways between decontamination and the outside world to be closed but with that many Marines shuffling out, it wasn't worth the effort on a world with breathable atmosphere.

With a click, Shepard's helmet had gone on, her rifle activated as with one hand gestured Hitman had moved out. "VIPs, stay back. Come out when I signal. Gul, Durante, stick with them."

It was odd by all accounts: usually QRF forces had dropped in in the middle of engagement, but things had been quiet. Too quiet. That was why when the shadow of a human figure had popped out on the balcony they had raised their hands, surprised to see over twenty Marines push out toward them.

"Identify!" Kaiden had yelled out, rifles pointed at the single figure. It had indeed been a Human man.

"David al Talaqani! I'm a colonist!"

Kaiden had looked back to Shepard as she was in the rear position, she cutting forward, leaving the Chiefs with the VIPs in the back. Al Talaqani had a rifle strapped to his back, his clothes that of a maintenance worker. By no means clean, and by all accounts roughed up. Shepard had approached him, waving her men down as she had simply gestured for them to push past and secure a perimeter. The unease that al Talaqani felt had barely been assuaged as Shepard offered a hand to shake.

"Commander Shepard. The colony called for a QRF?" She said promptly.

He nodded weakly. "Fai Dan did. He's our leader. He needs your help preparing for the Geth."

"Thought you guys were handling them well enough?" She asked the tired colonist earnestly.

He was tired as he answered. "Small recon groups, but not an entire shipworth of th-"

"Contact!"

This was more like it. The appearance of Geth on that walkway, seemingly from nowhere, the way that the Marines all bunched up had desperately tried to make themselves smaller or along the walls. The last few of them had still been walking out of the Normandy when the gunfire started.

A small patrol, no more than three Geth units seemed to have come out of the walls as the entire Marine group either dived against the walls and those up front had went gun up.

Shepard had charged al Talaqani, bringing him under her as she laid on top, covering him.

The three Geth units had been outgunned by a factor of six at least, so when they were cut down behind al Talaqani no one had been surprised. They were just an appetizer, a welcoming party perhaps.

Shepard had joined in on that fire as their mechanical bodies hit ground, back on the Normandy still Tali had poked her head out as soon as the gunfire started, raring to go.

"Tali." JD had called out behind her, warning her to stay, her shotgun held in a white-knuckle grip that spoke to an eagerness that betrayed her.

Shepard had yelled out as a man painfully writhed beneath her stomach. "Secure the dock! Everyone else on me! We're pushing out to the colony!"

It was a hint toward the Protheans that they had ships similar to stature to the Normandy: these docks had been designed for ships of her size. They weren't designed for combat as Shepard pushed up with Kaidan and Ashley on her wings, al Talaqani keeping his head down as an entire platoon of Marines went around him.

If Tali had felt the urge to fight, then Wrex and Mai had been drowned in that feeling, the two side by side for once, not breathing down each other's necks.

JD, Garrus, and Liara had been just fine where they were, Joker still in conversation distance.

"Yeah, that'll be a Marine wrecking ball for ya." The pilot said blowing a raspberry.

"So I hear." Garrus roughly commented, sniper rifle his shoulder. "The _violence of action_ is effective."

So, the reserve group had waited a few minutes, the distant shots of gunfire going off, heard from the exposed Normandy. A choice unit of Marines had been left behind for dock security, but it had left the rest out.

Mai had thought otherwise. She had winged JD's shoulder for a moment, and then, unexpectedly, Wrex's. The Korgan had grunted, but he had known her intention as she took a few steps out of the Normandy. Of all the people there who wouldn't stand by, he would understand as the two moved up and out, out of sight, past the Marines on guard as they wouldn't dare stop the two monsters.

JD had been left alone, not following. It was his initiative now. The comm channel had been heavy with combat chatter, throwing fire at Geth that had been in that very tower. All of it had reeked of aggression, of fighting.

It seemed far enough away by JD's gauge at least. "Hey, Garrus," the shock trooper asked of him, the Turian leveling his sniper rifle ready. "On me."

He nodded. "Ladies?" The Turian asked behind him, they had been expecting, and Tali had been raring to go. Liara had that shake in her step, the memory of that same Geth gunfire rattling her, a hand on her pistol, still in its holster. Tali had pushed past Garrus, more purposefully bumping into him in good jest, Liara had to be beckoned with a shift of his hand.

Al Talaqani had his head between his hands, sitting behind crates as one of the Hitmen had stood ready above him, rifle out. "Helluva fireteam." the Marine mumbled. Al Talaqani had looked up to see that black shock trooper and the Turian up front.

"A Turian?" The colonist had been surprised, Garrus had nodded as he aimed up and out at the ready.

"More than that." Garrus thumbed back. "All we're missing is a Drell, Volus, and Batarian for a true diversity."

His snark was appreciated as a meaty explosion had went off, shaking the dust off the roof of the bay. JD reached a hand down, grabbing al Talaqani up. He was weak, his grip barely there as his rifle was left behind on the ground. "Your settlement nearby?" The shock trooper asked.

"Yeah, yeah." he said. He was strained by this whole deal; JD had seen many settlers out along the colonies have this dead look in their eye: their entire lives destroyed after being built.

Liara had looked up at the ceiling above, the ancient Prothean ruins that had been denied to her because of private interest. It took her mind off the present gunfire echoing further in.

"Mind leading us there? We can help out while we can secure the area." JD asked softly.

Mai had been proactive. "Hitman 1-Actual. VIP Section is moving up the rear to the colony."

"Copy all." The sound of gunfire behind her voice had been heard as Mai sent off the message.

This was what it was like, following in Shepard's wake. The bits and pieces of Geth left, the bullet holes and scorch marks, it led the way into the tower proper, Wrex and Mai on point. Hell had been brewing around them and they were just missing it. Still they were walking in more than the steps of Shepard.

Liara had took every step so precisely, her head craned and cocked up and down, seeing the geometry of her surroundings. "We walk where _they _did." She said, beneath a helmet put on.

Tali had been more focused on the pieces of Geth, disintegrating and exploding around them, still, she entertained the good doctor's words. "Yeah?"

Liara nodded as Mai and Wrex had led up the stairs by Al Talaqani's prompting, the man silent, amongst foreign people, aliens, and that machine of a woman. "How many billions of Protheans called this their home? All just wiped out, just like that? Leaving behind nothing but these ruins which still stand, which still function?"

How many ghosts? How many souls had been left there, and why?

These Protheans were lucky, a thought for both Mai and JD. Glassing left nothing human behind. Just the blackened rock and the crystallized crust of a world damned. Was it an infestation? A disease that reaped the Protheans? Or was it themselves?

Garrus had looked down a long corridor, only seeing a squad of Hitmen attend to one of their own, clutching his stomach as one of them passed some biogel over it.

Fighting had been close, but not close enough for some of them. The tower rocked with it, Al-Talaqani shaking with each concussive rock. He felt a pain beyond them folding his arms across his chest and shivering.

They walked through that tower, missing battles, missing firefights led by Shepard, but eventually they had made it to what had been the colony on Feros: Zhu's Hope.

Colonies were often built on the skeletons of the original colony ships, and it didn't surprise anyone there that it was built into the bones of a freighter.

The UNSC wouldn't classify a colony of that size as one, JD knew, more of an outpost, but the Alliance operated on different guidelines. The very fact that there was a "colony" here meant that it was a planet within the Human domain, and all that that meant as far as galactic politics went.

Prefabs and tents, a sorry looking state, but Mai wouldn't judge. Better than she had it on New Jerusalem.

Entering into the open-air perimeter, defenders posted on low walls and crates, looking at her, aiming guns at her as she entered.

"Geth!" They yelled at her.

She had shrugged off one shot to her shields, barely moving as she gestured back behind her.

Al-Talaqani had rushed up. "It's me! It's me! They're part of the QRF!"

"God in Heaven! Is that what's going on?!"

It was odd to be in the midst of Hell and not be the cause of it, Mai feeling her kinetics recharge back in as the rest of the procession moved up, spooked by the report of one gunshot hitting Mai. Only JD remained behind, an arm out holding Liara back.

_"Shit, the Alliance got a lot more diverse since we got here!"_

Mai had raised her hand in as much of a calming presence she could. Normally in these instances she would've already been on top of them, drilling into their heads. Times had changed, pinging her radio. "Hitman Actual. We've made contact with the colony. Awaiting on you."

A battle-heavy response, filled with the cool tones of a woman who had made her life in it. "Copy. We'll rendezvous. Broadcast your coordinates."

Even with that promise the fighting around them didn't stop, but eventually, eventually, they had subsided altogether, replaced by the march of boots. Though there had been a moment there, standing at the barricades, dirty colonists looking at them as they all stood, unwilling to go forward, to initiate beyond what they had gone to. Al-Talaqani had already rejoined them, but that only left a line, spread horizontal, spread out from the doorway. As if they were subject to a firing line.

JD had taken a glance back as he tentatively moved up, gesturing Liara to get behind Mai: Gunshots had flowered from the doorway. These colonists had been busy.

The lucky colonists were always busy, because otherwise JD had found them dead back on drops.

The Turians and Krogan shared very little in their long galactic history together. Shared animosity toward Humans had been one of them. Krogans hadn't much trusted anyone, and Garrus there had stood on more of that history, but together with Wrex, they had been the ones keeping their guns at low ready.

Tali wasn't going to say anything, neither Liara or Mai.

He was once the quiet man in all of his squads, he remembered as he let the rifle drop on his sling and he put his hands up. "We're here to help."

* * *

Shepard had come not too long after with more Marines than the colony had hoped for. A whole platoon for what was increasingly evident had been a small AO, all things compared. Normally cities had been more the operational space, not towers for colony rescues.

JD had pointed over to Shepard as she had come in the same pathway that the rear team had come through. He had been the only one to bridge that gap, and consequently one of the colonists had done as well.

Short cut hair, utilitarian, cheek bones deeply shown and wrinkled caked with dust and debris. He looked like a colonist: Fai Dan. These types of leaders always earned their mark by hardship and he had the taint of it.

Pushing past JD before they had even shaken hands, JD had figured what type of aura he had put up: Ignorable. Fine by him.

For these types of people focus had been the line between life and death, and anything foreign was liable to kill them, which is why a good lot of the colonist which guarded the entrance to the colony still had their guns up as the Marines shifted through forward, Fai Dan meeting with Shepard.

"I'm so glad help finally came! And Commander Shepard no less!"

Her reputation preceded her, her assault rifle's barrel dripping with carbon build up. She had put on a smile as she took Fai Dan's hand to shake, but was distracted as one of her men was carried through, his arm across another. Took a shot to the gut. Armor had stopped it but the concussion remained.

The colonist had welcomed her Marines in readily, and that she was glad for at least.

"The Geth have been prodding at us for days now! We didn't want to call in an official QRF, but things just got too hot around here." Fai Dan had explained, gesturing to the smoke and fires around. "We're colonists, not fighters."

Shepard's gaze had lingered, and so did Liara's for that matter. Around the encampment, it was pretty much nothing but. Nothing out of the ordinary, no obvious signage that would bring the Geth here.

The Geth never did anything aimlessly.

"Exo-Geni funds this colony, correct?" Shepard asked, one hand before hers stealthily gesturing the rear team to move forward and up. They did at Mai and JD's lead, shuffling with the Marines into it. Fai-Dan had nodded readily.

"Most of us worked there at some point, they're set up in the connecting tower." Exo-Geni, as far as Shepard remembered, operated on the fringes for a reason. Out of sight, out of mind, the private ventures of Human endeavors she never really enjoyed. "We haven't been in contact, the Geth are doing something fierce with our comms, and, well, the bridge has an army of Geth patrolling."

Shepard had patted the man's shoulders, coaxing him into the colony. "If it were easy, you wouldn't have needed our help, yeah?" Even now she had given him a smile.

"Right. Yeah. Still, with you here we can get this colony operational again."

As the two walked in a darker woman had walked out, approaching the remaining rear group. "You two, and you, with the sniper rifle!" She had pointed at Mai and JD, followed by Garrus. "We need you on the wall we've got contact crawling up one of the support towers!" As far as command went, no soldier was intractable about who the orders came from when it was in the thick of it. "And you, Krogan! We've got a door that needs plugging on the other end of the colony!"

Wrex had belted out some amusement. As long as he fought. "Come on, Quarian." He had summoned Tali with him and she had been just as enthused.

It left Liara alone, caught up in the colony as it all moved around her, her feet on ancient metal.

In a brief moment of sanity Liara grounded herself to what she knew, looking up at a tower that went higher still. She thought of the Protheans. Only on Thessia or Ilum; planets of pure Asari might and majesty, did they come even close to the projected structures that these Protheans left behind now from their extinction. They were nothing but ants, crawling on dead bones and burnt worlds.

She had gone to her omni, finding a place to sit within the colony, and started typing her notes.

* * *

Deja-vu.

Coaxed by the colonist that seemed to command the defenses, JD, Mai, and Garrus had rushed through the dusty colony, men and women were shell shocked, all looking at the odd trio be ushered to a raised railing and platform. Zhu's Hope had been situated on what felt like an open air courtyard, peering out into the clouds they were above, the nearest sky scraper connected to their current tower clearly showing a problem.

Skidding to a ready on the railing, Garrus had been more than willing to verbalize.

"You've got a Geth problem." Dry humor had been always up his alley. His audience had been less than expecting as he glanced over and saw two helmets look at him before looking at each other. It was a tough crowd, he realized, going to his visor and adjusting for what was to come.

"Spot." Mai had let out, JD had only nodded, letting down his own weapon and clicking the side of his helmet.

There was still a base zero to their HUD software, one that let JD point out targets as Mai had practiced one of the finer aspects of her skill set.

There was a sniper among the Spartans, legendary among them even. Kurt had been spoken of her during her own sniper training, and all those anecdotal stories, lessons, memories. A whisper of them were in her ear, seeing the spiders of the white Geth crawl upon in the distance.

Like spiders.

The first shot, it was a sense of security JD had known in his morbid life, living on the battlefield. To hear Mai shoot, it was of comfort and security. She had it well in hand as the first shots rang out and the outlined traces of an enemy were splattered against the rusted walls of the tower before falling down, and down, below the clouds.

In his right ear had been Mai, transitioning from target to target flawlessly, the endless stream of sporadic Geth crawlers without cover, a shooting range like she had never known.

To his left: Garrus picked up the scraps.

Like spiders.

JD couldn't stop thinking of the white Geth like them out in the distance. To him they were nothing more than the size of spiders.

Being born on Luna, he lived a relatively normal childhood, all things considered, however like all born on environments such as moons or space stations there were little things associated with how unnatural it was.

One of his father's duties as a detective had been to investigate contraband smuggled onto Luna, and into Cirsium City. Insurrectionist activity, mostly, bomb making materials or weapons; otherwise drugs or counterfeit goods. There was one case above all however that JD remembered as a child.

Mai had modified her DMR, cutting down its barrel to afford her more ergonomics if push came to shove, recrowning it on her own. However, because of that the flash of muzzle fire that emerged had been larger, and he twitched at it for a moment.

It was a fluke, really, an honest mistake: a shipment of perishables had carried on stowaways of the eight-legged kind: House spiders. Little black apparitions, barely the size of a thumb, crawling about in a sealed container and quarantined in port by the authorities. They had bred, hundreds and hundreds of spiders crawling atop each other, sealed inside a cargo container the size of a shack.

Cirsium's ecosystem (there wasn't one) did not support spiders if anyone could help it. The idea of spiders getting loose in the city had been terrible in its own right.

This was the first time JD had ever seen a real-life insect. His father had brought him to the port just for that fact.

It wasn't the spider that JD remembered though: It was how they were dealt with.

A unit of UNSC Hellbringers had been in transit in the same port that day when the spiders were found. JD knew the specifics of them after he became an ODST: siege soldiers. When positions could not be blown up, they could be burnt out. Their flamethrowers and white phosphorus had been the closest the Covenant had gotten to knowing what it felt like to be Glassed.

They were there that day, and, on the recommendation of the Port Authority, they were the solution. Something that the unit was more than happy to oblige.

A woman with a strong Hungarian accent (she had been from Reach), had, a moment before she hauled her flamethrower over to the cordoned off area of the port where that container had been, stood before JD and looked down upon him.

_"Will it hurt?" A younger JD had asked her as his father held his shoulders in caution._

_The woman smiled down at him. "I am merely cleaning… what is word…" she considered. "Making of purity. It hurts because must."_

She turned away, her hands ready with her flamethrower as she simply slapped down her goggles and walked before that cargo container and aimed.

He remembered the flame, he remembered the heat, he remembered what it looked like when thousands of spiders were alight: burned into his memory.

He thought it was beautiful.

There was something else though: two pieces of a puzzle that were never intended to lock together.

This was what the Covenant thought when they Glassed planets, Glassed Humanity.

He _understood _now.

By God. He knew. He felt.

The two marksmen didn't particularly notice when JD had taken a knee and instead sat against the railing, his helmet disguising the blank look on his face.

What Mai did notice was Garrus however, deciding to see how exactly he had been taking the shots he did. He had been landing all of them.

Garrus hooked his left arm around, using it as a crook for his sniper rifle to lay on, stock in his shoulder. In the corner of Mai's eye she had recognized the technique. "You're not just some grunt, are you?"

Garrus had been in the middle of sucking in a breath as another shot rang out, and, appropriately, a white Geth had fallen off, down into the clouds and then, eventually, to join the rubble of Feros. He let go of it only after the shot. "If you must know, I was a sniper. Not by choice, but turned out I was just a good-" Mai had fired off a burst from her rifle. Another kill. He continued. "Shot."

Specializations. With a Spartan's uber competence in every military technique, such a concept seemed vain if applied, but still there were outliers. Like her with solo operations. Spartans who had been snipers, explosives experts, leaders and pure destruction made metal, they were something beyond compare.

"They trained you special?"

This was the most he had ever talked to Mai. It was easier than he thought, but still hard. "After the fact."

"Hm." She ground out as she put another Geth in the ground.

Tentatively, all JD could do was sit there between the Turian and the Spartan as he thought about Demons and Purity.

* * *

The tempo of sniper fire from outside the main prefab had been oddly reassuring to Shepard as she was run down the list of needs the colony had accrued on top of the Geth attacking.

Food, water, sewage, bare infrastructure and security.

Fai Dan had gone over this up and down as Shepard agreed with her head nodding, helmet on the main planning table and all of its holographic allure. Lost in its blues, the familiarity of what she was doing, it gave way to something over the shoulder of her mind's eye:

machineandfleshandbloodandextinctiontobereapedanddestroyedandthecyclegoesonandonandonandonandon

Words out of her mouth as Fai Dan was describing the Varren problem. "There's a reason the Geth are here, we suspect." Not suspect. She knew. If the Geth were here, Saren was interested. She knew it in her bones, her heart, her mind.

Fai Dan had been taken slightly off guard as Shepard said it, looking directly into him.

"What would that be?" He asked with a raised eyebrow.

Shepard had reeled back for a moment. She would never be so upfront like that usually, not to a colonist, trying to find her words. She was always at least three paragraphs ahead in a conversation. That being said she was off recently no doubt with how she slept.

"Did Exo-Geni find anything particularly anomalous in regards to the Protheans? The Geth are awfully interested in them nowadays, especially working technology."

Fai Dan had paused, working over an answer in his own head. Maybe a touch too long but the gunfire had often broken her own thoughts years ago when she was unacquainted. "It would be easy to say so, but we've found nothing here. Exo-Geni that is. No artifacts, no new technology. Nothing."

Nothing.

There was never ever nothing. Zero was an impossible number. 0% something that was in itself a paradox.

Shepard had inwardly shaken herself. She was getting too paranoid recently and it had been showing, even against someone she had hardly known and was in charge of assisting.

Metal footsteps behind her:

Fai Dan and Shepard turned over, it was Kaiden.

"Valentine is fine, he'll be up as soon as the healing agent kicks in." He reported, thumbing over to the colony's own medical prefab.

Hitman was reliable as far as fireteams went, courtesy of her mentor of course, but it meant that she could afford to stay put and lord over the situation as needed. Kaiden reporting the one injury so far, and it had been impressive that it had been only one, had settled her mind. She nodded as he approached, helmet in hand as gunfire continued, albeit quieting as it got further and further away.

"Rest of our fireteams going hunter killer?"

Kaiden had nodded at Shepard. "Up and down, giving us a cushion." Another gunshot from Garrus and his sniper rifle punctuated. "Smooth sailing, knock on wood, Commander."

"Mm." She affirmed with a nod. "Our lovely host here says we have some things to assist them with before we can sanitize the area and proceed with our prerogative in regards to our Council tasking."

Fai Dan nodded in turn now. "I hate to ask such a thing. We're such an independent colony that it pains us to even call out for help, but please-"

Shepard rose a hand. "Say no more. You're certified bad asses for living out here on the ruins of an alien empire, you know that? Just allow us to help." It was true that Shepard had a calming effect on people who were dying, according to one tabloid piece on her. Fai Dan believed it at that moment as much as he recognized it was a childish appeal to his ego. "Go ahead on what you need again?" She thumbed the mic of her radio as Fai Dan explained.

"Water, Geth, and then Varren… that's all we need dealt with."

Fai Dan had gone down the list: what they needed and what had been happening. Clogged up water veins, rogue Varren that needed to be hunted, and, of course, the Geth down the way and their reinforcements. It wasn't anything that a seasoned Marine hadn't been familiar with, especially one on a QRF track.

On an open mic, a fireteam had opened fire into a pair of Geth, the victor apparent with the casualness that answered: "Hitman Actual, we're clearing up the Geth real easy. Hitting more points then they can take on at a time. I figure we'll have this tower locked on within the hour."

Shepard nodded, locking eyes with Kaiden.

"Hitman will largely secure this tower and then push out toward the Exo-Geni HQ. I need shooters here of course for rear security, but also to help these people out. We're not gonna be here long so we've gotta do what we can now."

Kaiden nodded promptly, hitting his radio. "Hitman. I need forward units posted, but the rest to rally back at the colony."

A procession of affirmatives came over the net, and then the gruff hum from Wrex. His channel had been opened for a moment longer than usual however, as if considering something. "Me and the Quarian, we're still doing work."

Kaiden opened his mouth to answer but Shepard raised a finger; she was going to take that. "Proceed as you will, but we need you back to organize for a proper strike mission."

Behind the radio she heard Tali's shotgun blast, only for a metal crunch fall. Tali's panting had followed before a distressed grunt from her settled.

* * *

"We'll be back soon enough." Was Wrex's answer after the reverb, going dark, getting busy. It was a decidedly casual conversation based on what he had been standing over: Two dead Geth in the tunnels of their tower and, more importantly, a Quarian in question.

The Covenant had gods, Tali remembered: Forerunners.

That was what the translation turned out into Quarian in her readings of the Covenant. Tali had looked upon a pair of Geth, kneeling upon that bright light as she and Wrex had rounded the doorway and looked down into a room. It was a sight unexpected, and it filled them with questions. The Covenant might've had answers to this on their own:

On Faith. On Spirits. On Life.

_Does this unit have a soul?_

She wasn't Covenant however.

The answer she gave the questions in her own head was of gunfire, having raised her shotgun and blowing them away.

The young Quarian had turned her head to Wrex urgently after they dropped, and her eyes were that of doubt. A doubt he understood: _What am I doing?_

"Good." He muttered, glancing at her smoking shotgun. "Vent."

A breath she held was let out as she realized her shotgun was overheating, the pain going through her gloves as it dropped. "_Ow!"_

He was young once. He made mistakes.

Wrex kneeled down and picking up the shotgun, holstering his own. Tali had reached out after dealing with the pain, however he had stopped her with a raised palm. "A bit of shotgun overheating is due to the carbon build up." He racked back her shotgun, exposing the vents and the blackened soot on its coils. Abruptly he had jerked the gun like a crank once, sending a great deal it off. "Less carbon, more time on target. Here."

He had shut the shotgun closed, handing it back to her as she was silent, taking in the answer. "Thank you." She said, almost silently amidst the hum of an ancient building.

"I don't respect mercenaries, you know kid?"

"Hm?"

Wrex nodded to himself. "They kill for other people, fight for causes not their own… I… respect my enemy if I know, at minimum, they're fighting in something they _believe_ in." He pointed at what looked like an altar of light and the disintegrating bodies of the Geth. "That looks like belief to me. Belief in… something."

She looked back for a second. How could machines believe in something beyond empirical?

"Do people deserve to be killed for their beliefs?"

Wrex had grinded his teeth. How many bodies and how many years had he dealt with in pursuit of that question? Why hadn't he been dead yet? The answer was the same one he gave the Quarian:

"You're the one on the trigger. That's up to you to decide."


	24. 1-18: Gaia - Mark of the Beast - Geas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Expect more chapters up in short order due to the world's circumstances right now.
> 
> Also a lot of puking in this chapter, which is pretty odd, but hey shit gets a little real. We know how Zhu's Hope goes down.
> 
> Anyway a personal note when writing this: As far as like, music and ambiance, it's all Mass Effect standard from ever since Altis. This story is Mai and JD and the Covenant immersed in the world of Mass Effect and so their themes reign, if you guys are the sort to imagine that. It's what I do personally, but there is a moment in this chapter, when the word Thanatos is used, where a moment of the Didact's theme in my mind plays. That slow chanting, just for a moment.
> 
> Because this is a story that I hope is fun to read, despite it's girthy chapters, I will eventually start putting music cues, but that's not for a while, and when I do the first one I want it to fucking critical hit.
> 
> Read and enjoy, we'll be back to more chapters soon.

* * *

**1-18**  
**Gaia - Mark of the Beast - Geas**

* * *

"Tell me, Usze, did you ever wonder what the Great Journey would've been like?"

Victory was assured after Reach. Every member of the Covenant felt it in their bones as it was announced that they had found the home of the Demons and were burning it. The Great Journey by the Sacred Rings was assured, and closer than it had ever been.

Now it had, like everything, been so very, very far away.

Karonee had referred to Usze by name, nowadays, the titles he had been going through by necessity making even her head spin. The two had stood together on the bridge of the Ardent Prayer in low orbit, an Engineer hovering above them toying with the holographic interfaces, ensuring that the Ardent Prayer's last modification had been playing well with the ship's systems.

"_Mass Effect drive powering up within theorized tolerances."_

_"Confirmed. Begin drive discharge test."_

The Sangheili engineers had relayed information quietly as the two had silently looked on.

Usze had been clad in the armor of his forefathers: that of Ascetic faith and tutelage, steel mandibles like blades out from his helmet. Karonee had otherwise worn the golden metal as befit all Fleetmasters, the half cape over her one side silent and still as she, awaiting his answer.

Realistically, in the small of his mind that kept him just the slightest grounded, he didn't think he was going to see the Great Journey played out as intended. The scar on his face burned and he beat back the impulse to press upon it beyond his helmet.

"I see, perhaps, what my life would've been like had I not been called to serve. If there was no need for me."

Karonee turned, glancing at his damaged energy sword, the scar of it made by a knife matching the one of his face. "Is that not the opportunity that we have now? Here?"

Usze tilted his head at her, unsure of her question. "I heard rumors of you, prior to my deployment on the Solace."

"Go on?" She already knew.

"You sought… communion, answers, in the… presumed wisdom of a Brute chieftain." As if there was a thing, Usze shrewdly thought. "That chieftain then pledged himself to Atriox and disappeared. The only reason why you were spared punishment, judgement, was by the recommendation of the High Prophet of Regret. You ask many questions still, Shipmistress."

There was a grin behind her golden-clad mandibles, but it disappeared. She remembered being brought before High Charity, before the High Prophets, held at the whim of the Council that a bias of her established simply because she was who she was. She was a questioner, always, from the time she was a child. None would answer her as a younger officer, save for an individual who knew what it meant to be low in the Covenant despite what they were capable of. For her curiosity, they would have-

"There was talk among the Council of making me… Arbiter." She spoke to Usze with a haunted voice. "But even they would not disgrace the very title with me."

Usze had spoken the truth. "I hold no such misgivings of you in _that _manner, Shipmistress."

"Noted. But you do otherwise?"

Usze sniffed the air reflexively, noting a stench intertwined: of pomp and of power. He answered the question, "No, not necessarily. Still your talk is interesting, Shipmistress. Far more interesting than others I have served."

Arrived in the bridge had been two representatives from the concerned parties on the Solace. Towering over the rest of the Ardent Prayer's crew had been the Prelate. Its hardlight bracers glowing with the promise of violence, their full encompassing armor hiding any notion that this indeed had been a flesh and blood being. The Prelate was Destiny's representative on this journey, reporting back to him and relaying messages from him to Karonee. She preferred this type of arrangement, all things considered.

Besides the San'Shyuum super soldier had been the new de-facto Chieftain of the Solace: Mercaius. Still in his blue armor, he had been yet gifted the distinction, he still had something to prove to the Brutes.

This, Karonee, could not deny him. He would find it, hopefully, in this galaxy.

"We'll be underway soon. Some Quarians are still aboard handing off supplies and intelligence." Karonee explained.

Ke Nazhumee had seen the Quarians off in one of their Kodiak shuttles.

The Quarians had insisted that some representatives come with the Prayer as it tested its new waters, but Destiny declined. It would do no one good, and the Quarians still needed to prepare for their own Great Journey.

Shala'Raan had been one of the remaining, the last to step off the Ardent Prayer, escorted by Ke.

"You have been so helpful, Major Nazhumee." She spoke to him softly. Ke had been unfamiliar with such thanks for his service, but he had taken it with grace, giving her a subtle salute of the Elites: a fist at his chest and a bowed head.

"It's been my honor Admiral, and, it shall continue to be."

For a warrior race, as they were proclaimed, the particular example of Ke had been so formal, so polite. Majestic perhaps, in his silver ranger armor. Like the knights of old Human mythology. He had entertained her, and she had returned the favor, in explanations of each other: individual and as their own species. It had made this entire deal more comfortable, she had admitted, and he had echoed.

Shala'Raan had awaited a moment before setting herself into the Kodiak, but not without a message for Ke. Her eyes drew to the stars outside of the hanger bay, and then the ships of her home that would lead her Home, intermingling with the Alliance ships and various Council representatives. "It is good that you are going on this voyage now: It is perhaps the last time you can see our Galaxy as we know it."

She departed after Ke had given her an understanding nod, and soon afterwards the Ardent Prayer began a test that the entire Galaxy had been tuned into, save for a certain Marine group on Feros.

_"Borer is charged, Shipmistress."_

_"Coordinates locked in, beginning planer incision."_

_"Creating microjump intervals."_

It was good to be back in command. Good enough for Karonee to stand from her gravity chair and look among her crew, ready and waiting to do what they had been waiting years to do in some way. They all, technically, had waited an entire Age, and seen a new one born because of them: Discovery.

The officers looked back to her and awaited with bated breath.

On the SSV Perugia, observing from a distance, Shaw held tightly onto his chair, hoping to not repeat the fall of last time as Engineer Daniels and Donnelly awaited a new science to be made right in front of them.

From below: Mordin Solus, former STG, sitting at the front step of his clinic on Altis, looking up at the event, had rubbed shoulders with Avitus Rix, protégé to the galaxy's most wanted individual. The future was unsure, even without the Covenant.

"Proceed." Karonee had given her word, and the Ardent Prayer glowed and a storm was manifested in front of its nose: A Slipspace rupture.

"Brace." Captain Shaw had ordered throughout orbit. There was no need for concern however as the Ardent Prayer gracefully settled into the eye of her storm, and the Galaxy saw what a Slipspace Jump was. For the first time in that galaxy, FTL was performed without the Relays, and the rulebook was thrown out. The design of the ancients was rewritten by the grace of another history.

On the bridge of the Savannah, the AI had rattled awake as he read his remaining sensors, detecting the rupture, only to peer up at the same view that almost everyone on Altis had been occupied with. "Oh, what in Sam Hill did you land up into?" He spoke to himself.

On the far side of the planet, away from anyone looking, Sara Ryder had been otherwise occupied confirming the science, theory, and physics behind the main insertion vehicle for Orbital Drop Shock Troopers. If it was good enough for the UNSC, it was good enough for them, and they had a perfect ship model to test it on.

There was a route planned for the Ardent Prayer, one that took them around Alliance, and then Council Space. Destination one had been the coordinates that had clued them all into the fact that they were a long way from home.

To the outside world, it took them no more than a few days. To them, it was hours. When they arrived however, in an agreed safe spot so as to not cause another incident that almost grounded Captain Shaw's ship, they felt eternity staring at them.

It was green and blue, and Human too. So, so Human.

Mercaius had struggled to hold onto his gravity hammer as his eyes took in the sight, and spoke the words that many refused to say:

"By the Rings. It's beautiful."

* * *

School circle again, albeit concentrated near the railing of the colony to let Garrus and Mai continue their work on sniper duty. Enough of Hitman had extended out, securing an actionable perimeter to give the colony breathing room to operate, the rest had returned.

Valentine, the wounded Marine, he had seemed pained but still at ready, having rejoined everyone as Hitman gave him a careful nod. "Be careful next time, ya?" Bannon chided him.

"I got a wife at home telling me the same thing, go figure." Valentine responded.

Shepard had a data pad at her hip as she had awaited the last ones out: Tali and Wrex.

There was a wild look in the Quarian's eye, and yet a smirk of self-satisfaction had been worn over it.

"You two clean up?" The commander had asked.

Wrex had nodded. "A bit." It was noted throughout their various away missions that the Krogan had been involved. Mercenaries, Wrex had explained. Saren was promising something more however than money. "Shame. If only this one could talk." There was dead Krogan being dragged by their leg by Wrex, brought to the colony. With a thump the massive body had settled, road burn on its face just by how Wrex carried them. A hole in its gut had been the reason they had been like this.

"You do that?" Ashley poked.

Tali with a prideful nod had answered.

"Not a bad shot, Quarian. Preserved enough of the armor to fashion some utility out of it." In the rush of setting up in the colony there were mysteries that were overlooked, one of the most blatant that of the Salarian. Shepard had asked Fai Dan, and then the Salarian themselves, about the obvious question: Why are you here?

"I can't say." Ledra, the Salarian merchant, answered. "It's just one of those things you're compelled to do… Don't you understand Commander?"

She did, but perhaps not in the way that he thought.

An odd sight, he giving wide berth of the living Krogan to approach the dead one, he had kneeled. "I can take care of this body."

Wrex had sharply turned over to the Salarian, his shadow over them. "I tend not to trust Salarians toying even with Krogan dead."

Merchants were quick on the tongue enough, and Ledran had been no exception as he adjusted the collar of his suit. "Just the armor I'm interested in. I'll pay you for it."

Wrex didn't even dignify that with a response, flicking his wrist away to join the circle.

There was blood on Tali's lavender suit, staining it darker. Crossing her arms there was a swagger to her, vindicated by battle.

A mental note for later, Shepard figured.

As Ledran was dragging away the Krogan with all his might she had made the math in her mind and began her briefing.

"So we know the infrastructural issues that Zhu's Hope is dealing with. Most of them Geth related, one fauna. We make quick work of that and go link up with the ExoGeni goons if they're still kicking. I've gotta feeling they have an idea what's going down around here."

Shepard had gotten more information, the tower connecting had been an ExoGeni hub of some sort. Real hush hush, and still very much active.

Not every colony wanted the help of the Alliance Marines however. Not every Human colony appreciated assistance from the government they left in a way. JD and Mai didn't need to be natives to know that. It was then and there Mai had recalled that she didn't know this planet. It was a bit further north of UNSC core sector than she had operated in.

Some of Hitman, and Shepard even, pegged the aura of the colony as… cold of them, and yet welcoming.

"What's the rush ma'am? Apparently, this place is such a nice place to set up." A Hitman had mockingly parroted. The same general question had been asked by the away party to generally chat with the colonists, taking the edge off: _Why are you here?_

_It's nice. _They would answer. Anything more specific and Fai Dan would have to be pressed instead.

He didn't answer.

Everyone wanted to stay. Everyone wanted this to all be over and the Normandy to move on as fast as possible as any questions further would be ignored, like a veil being placed upon their minds and not interacting. Not even the most contracted up Spook held silence like they did in that way.

They felt the staring on the back of all of their heads. Expectant, placating, and yet…

Ashley had taken a knee, not talking to anyone in particular, looking down at the ground and saying it as hushed as she could. "Eighteen colonists here. We're twenty-seven, counting Doc T'Soni."

"Chief Gul counts as like ten, really, if it comes down to _it."_

It being fighting these colonists.

Shepard's face had soured, but shook it. She knew the feeling they all had but there were bigger issues than colonists in a funk. "Chief Williams, you good for some gun time?"

She stood back up with an eagerness in her eye. "Always."

"Won't be Geth, but I'm sure you can find some on the way."

Garrus tapped the side of his visor for a moment, considering where Shepard was going, looking at Mai and JD. "I can go deal with those Varren as well, Commander. Haven't hunted before, but I suppose now's a time to start. Chief Gul seems to have this well in hand."

Another sniper shot from her had affirmed.

Going by eye, Mai had handled herself well enough, JD throwing his legs over the edge toward the school circle.

"Long as you keep up the pace, Turian." The bravado of Ashley was not lost, deeply rooted in her blood and history when presented with having a Turian with her. Shepard hadn't put them together on mission for the specific reason of hashing out the implicit bias that Ashley had, but this was as good as a trial as any.

"He's not that bad, Williams." Tali had been more than sassy in a way that had been new. "Some may even consider him good company."

Garrus had set himself into a sit next to JD as that happened, his face going blank, relapsing a response as best he knew how: A wink back. A volley of finger guns had been shot back at him by her and he had surrendered as he simply got back on his own, actual gun.

JD had gestured with his hands toward himself, head tilted.

"You too, I guess. I mean you and Chief Gul are basically Quarians with your armor."

The shock trooper only rolled his head in response.

"Emerson," Shepard interjected before this got any further off. Hitman's original team leader had poked his head up. "Split the platoon, half are to make another sweep of this tower and knock out any Geth comm devices gunking up comms, the other half are staying here for security. After that the S&D team will reconvene in the vehicle bay and set out to the next tower over. Reports of fighting that way seem like Exo-Geni is still kicking."

"Aye ma'am." The Hitman had said, pointing out groups silently.

There had been exceptions however. "Chief Durante… You and Doc, you mind staying? Keeping security and treating?"

JD had cracked a smile behind his helmet, less action he saw the better. "Of course, ma'am."

"I'm staying too then."

Of all the people, of all the surprise that day, Mai had thrown in her hat as those present turned to her: a woman unmoving as if she said nothing at all. Impossible to read behind her flat tone, her faceless statue, Mai had spoken. She hadn't moved from her position, shooting Geth, but she did say something.

Shepard furrowed her eyebrows for a moment before tracking.

Mai might've been a monolithic machine, but not JD. Humans were social creatures, so when he turned his head to Mai Shepard had noticed.

Shepard licked the insides of her teeth a moment, tension there and she could taste it. "You have due diligence to conduct your own taskings, Chiefs, but Chief Gul, are you sure this is the best way you can contribute to this situation?"

Mai finally turned her head to Shepard sharply. "I can secure this settlement. You don't have to worry about it."

Shepard was many things. Oblivious hadn't been one of them. "You and Chief Durante really are an operational pair, huh?"

Wrex had chuckled as Mai had, unexpectedly, shifted her head in contemplation. "Ma'am?"

"Chief Gul, go, if you may." It felt like the first time JD had ever ordered her as she drew her attention away, and it felt, distinctly, wrong. It was for her own good however. "I'll be okay."

He was a survivor. Those of them there that hadn't known what the ODST helmet he had did, they had seen it depolarize and show his face, giving Mai a complacent look.

She cupped her hand at her chest, pulling up.

Not sign language. A Spartan sign.

He had looked at it, taking a moment to let his weapon fall upon his sling and then cross his wrists, forming fists and pulling down before putting his hand over his heart.

TRUST ME.

Did she trust anyone else in her life?

She was, within herself, the final word in battle and in war. She didn't need to be told anything about herself in regards to what it was to fight. Other people? They were more fallible in that sense. She always worked around them. She could never rely on other people 100%, especially when it came to her missions. It's why Lone Wolf was what she preferred. Though this was different.

Did she trust JD with his own life?

"Chief Gul, we'll have enough if we proceed. You make a point." Shepard relented, staring out at her company, landing her eyes on Liara and Garrus. "You two good with sticking up here?"

Garrus had been more than willing, nodding, propping up his sniper rifle between his legs. Liara had been out of it however in the mass of Marines. "Oh, why, yes. Of course."

She was behind a few of the Hitmen as she said that timidly, Shepard poking at her ear through her helmet. "Keep your comms up, Liara, if I find anything interesting I might ring you up about it."

Given purpose, Liara lit up, the weight of the pistol on her side less intimidating. "I'll be waiting then, Commander. If not, I do know a little first aid to administer."

"Doc," Liara and another Hitman had looked up: The Hitman known as Doc. It was Kaidan beckoning. "You've got a team here. You're lead." Shepard affirmed with a nod.

Doc, his bald head shining in the rather unkind light of Feros gave a thumbs up, silently poking out people he was taking to maintain security and triage for Zhu's Hope.

It was then that Shepard looked over to the two remaining VIPs: Wrex and Tali.

"Wrex, come with?"

He had given her a curt nod, stoic if not brief, the Krogan resting his hand on his shotgun as Shepard looked at Tali awaiting. The Quarian's swagger had been shaken off for a moment, the tear of battle known on her suit: of dust and dirt and synthetic fluid tarnishing the weave of it. Tali looked out beyond it all, at the towers of Prothean design, knowing that the Geth had been there.

"I want to go with the main assault team, into that headquarters where the Geth are set up."

Shepard had been surprised, albeit knowing why. "Keep your barriers charged and your gun up then. Wrex your battle buddy?"

The Quarian and the Krogan locked eyes. "Seems like it." Wrex grunted.

Tali had been more than comfortable with that.

"We're Oscar-Mike." Shepard had declared, Kaidan and her both looking off toward the distance, toward that spire in the distance with ExoGeni supposedly in. "Let's lock down the settlement, and then reorganize for that push. They have a Mako in the transport bay and we can commandeer."

* * *

The echoes of gunfire and the occasional concussive pump had denoted much of what Shepard and the rest of the Normandy crew had been doing out and about the tower they were on. Having traveled across with the Mako, comm updates were sent back on regular intervals. How many of them had been because of Shepard was up to anyone's guess, JD had thought as he reapplied a splint to one of the colonists. Working his more first-aid knowledge he had been accumulating had been perhaps better for him than going through Feros taking every floor from Synthetics.

It was easier for Liara's part as well, along with Garrus.

"You're lucky we're here, if you kept walking on that it would've led to some rather bad complications." Without fellow ODSTs to speak for him, JD had relented, tying off the splint as the colonist groaned in the cot wordlessly. "Stay here, don't move it. Let it set."

With a good amount of the Normandy's Marines remaining in Zhu's Hope, a lot of the battered, tired defenders had been taken off their guns and put to rest, aided and healed as best anyone could. They hadn't been willing, at first, however Shepard had made a point to ask with the entire company there.

For the less severe cases, injuries, JD had been assigned as Doc had otherwise been more involved. The man had known his stuff, if not as much as Chakwas, but he hadn't been the least kind about his trade as she was.

_"So there's no need for me to come down myself? Decker? Chief Durante?"_

Chakwas had been on the comms with the two men who had remained. Elsewhere Liara had put some of her own skills to the test, using her Biotic capability to diagnose particular mental stresses, offering kind words in her own oddly timid way. Tents had been erected in Zhu's Hope, providing more cots for the defenders to lay their heads. Those that had been already provided by Zhu's Hope supposedly cared for by an in-house medical professional.

"Aye Karin. I've got it all settled." Doc had rattled off over JD's shoulder into his comms, adjusting what seemed to be IV bags into some of the more injured, exhausted defenders.

Over his shoulder still, JD recognized the rhythmic patrol patterns, the heavy steps, of Mai, walking back and forth through the colony. As the sound of fighting stopped outright around them, it only left Mai's footsteps to fill it in.

If he didn't know any better, he might've thought she was pacing.

It wasn't up to him, in the end, that he wanted to be a medic, or at the very least trained better in first-aid. He had seen enough ODSTs die in his arms that he figure that he could've saved some if he had been better trained. Fixing burns, scrapes, the occasional gunshot and exhaustion, it was part of his base ODST training anyway, but still his building knowledge of first aid work had given him confidence that let him help.

The blue fire that came from Liara's hands had been captivating for JD as he had walked over to a cot, a male defender visibly shaking through his skin as he laid down. Her hands ghosted over her hands, tracing veins as the man's eyes were dead, and then settled into sleep.

The shadow of the ODST had spooked her as she appeared. "Oh- my."

JD had raised his hands, tilting his head apologetically as he pulled up a crate to sit, then motioning to the man.

"I just numbed his senses," Liara answered, tired, but productive. She had performed this particular therapy a bit in the last hour since Shepard had set off with half her team. "They are utterly shell shocked… I think that's the term."

JD nodded, licking his lips behind his helmet as he depolarized, offering Liara that at least as he looked at her hands. "Where'd you learn that?"

She pursed her lips politely, returning her hands to her lap. "One of my caretakers as a child did this when I was restless, I just… approximated it now, for this."

"Ah."

"I hear you have a technique? I do hear from the rest of Hitman that you're often sleeping."

He nodded, a crack of a smile. "It's not recommended, if not unhealthy, but…" One of his ODST squad mates of yesteryear had a mother who had cancer, and a trick that she had learned to grab shut-eye, whether or not the body wanted it or not, was to- "If you hyperventilate, you can pass yourself out if needed. Last resort."

"Oh my." Liara had observed with a hint of horror. It was expected.

"I sleep easy, anyway."

"That he does." The vibrato of Garrus had interrupted the two as he appeared in the tent, Doc had hardly paid attention as he did, not minding the Turian outright. A flash on his omni however alerted him to something else, Doc wandering out of the tent. "See, Doc T'Soni? For your first combat deployment it ain't that bad."

The sound of groaning men and women had underlined everything about that comment.

The three of them had sat in the awkward groaning for several seconds as Garrus corrected himself, pulling up a stool to sit. "Uh, what I mean is that no one is dead yet."

JD had simply tapped his gauntlet against the Turian's own in jest.

"I'm keeping busy," Liara had agreed awkwardly. "Being able to just walk here, it's illuminating. Maybe when the danger is gone outright, I can trade notes with those ExoGeni scientists."

"Don't be so naïve, Doc, you must know how corporate types are." Garrus rattled off.

Liara pursed her lips, tapping her fingers against her knees. "Well, perhaps. Thankfully in the Asari sphere I can escape the more enterprising researchers who do sell off their discoveries to the private firms, however the more valuable places in this galaxy as far as Protheans are concerned are under strict lock and key. This planet was one of them."

It didn't hit JD yet, perhaps it wouldn't have hit him at all: This planet was of ancients, not of his own. For Garrus and Liara though, not busy with the action of modern warfighting, they had taken their breaths, looked up and away, and stood before the ruins of those that they knew as gods. If the Citadel, in all of its majesty, had simply been the skeleton of the Protheans, then what had been an entire world of them been like?

Below the clouds, a hint of the ruins below. A million million graves.

Liara had said aloud, as trivia. "Sometimes, due to the toxicity and chemical make up of the weather system now, Feros is known to rain down below in colors. Black, grey, yellow, green, and sometimes purple."

"Purple rain eh?"

A guitar, off to the side of the tent, carried in by a shell-shocked defender as a source of comfort. JD kept his eyes on it for a moment longer than he should've as he beat back the thought and continued listening to Liara and Garrus talk about Feros, about the Protheans. Is this what the Covenant sounded like?

"This is my life's work, you know. To be here." Liara gestured to the very floor beneath them. "Ancient civilizations, precursor peoples… The Covenant, I've… I wondered if they were the Protheans at first, when they arrived. Communications on Therum were indistinct when they appeared over Altis, and, maybe, just maybe, with how they spoke and how they carried themselves, they were what I was looking for all this time."

JD kept his teeth clenched at Liara's musings. The Covenant to him was nothing but scourge, crusaders come to see Humanity as a plague. It was as simple as that.

"I met an… Elite? Elite, once." Garrus noted, thumbing to JD. "That red armored one, back on the Citadel. Seemed intense. Are they all like that?"

JD remembered the first time he had faced down an Elite; the first time he had seen one ignite an energy sword and disappear in glimmering light. He remembered the fear through his veins as his squad mates were cut down, one by one, until all at once he had simply taken his SMG had fired wildly into the air, seeing the shimmering signals of a hit and firing through.

"Seems like it." He answered.

A hitch, a feeling. Liara had looked at JD as he answered and she felt an unknowable something. Something that pricked at her fingers, something that tickled her nose, something that was just out of focus over his shoulder. She felt it once, with Shepard: it was a taint. It was there and gone.

"Covenant can't be that great." JD grumbled.

Garrus had been more than ready to correct him. "You seen the size of that ship they got? I mean, the piece of it. They say the whole of it is over half as long as the Citadel." The Long Night Solace. "Who the hell makes a ship that big? How can they? And all this talk of them being able to FTL without the Relays? If it's not great it's _something._"

"Something as good as this?" JD motioned outside, to the ruins, to the planet itself.

"Maybe," Liara touched her face, feeling the armored pads of her suit on her face. "Maybe not. That being said, these towers, these cities, they've survived nominally the test of time. The Covenant have only been around for a month or so."

Thirty years, more like. A thousand years before that, if their information was true.

Of course, they read it in plain English: the release of statements and biographies, released by Covenant to explain themselves so easily, so readily available in codexes galaxy wide. They had to read it; to know their enemy. After so many years Mai and JD had known so much about the Covenant that if they ever returned, they might've been locked down by ONI for the rest of their lives. Though here, it meant nothing, and all that toiling, late night reading, it meant nothing.

Mai's metal steps came and went again, reminding the three where they were.

"Chief Gul, she's awfully astute." Garrus observed.

"Mm." JD had affirmed, hearing her metal footsteps.

"How'd you two meet anyhow? On some black ops mission behind Batarian lines? I heard somewhere you used to be SOF Search and Rescue. She owe you her life?" he teased.

"The other way around." Those words had come out of JD so naturally he had been taken aback almost. They came out like his own breath and he had wondered, for the briefest of wandering moments, if that had been true. "Yeah."

If he, alone, had fallen onto Altis, there was no way he would've been alive today.

"Is she… always like this then?" Liara had posed the question that had JD gazing out the entrance of the tent, as if waiting for her to pass again as he considered.

_"Garlic bread." JD had started one day as he and Mai shared a quick bite before going back to weapon maintenance behind the Mako. "Mom, she used to make them so… unhealthily."_

_"Garlic bread?" Mai had asked as she chewed on her own meal, absent mindedly. Her eyes, her intense blue eyes, they often softened and looked with intrigue at him when he spoke of his family, his mother and father._

_"Mhm. Well, it really wasn't her fault," he explained, holding his own piece of bread and peanut butter to eat, getting crumbs everywhere and hoping Adams hadn't been around to see. "When we made garlic bread, she would send me down to our bodega to get the ingredients, and the woman who owned the bodega, she always had a special mix ready for me, and it was the most fatty, salty, garlic-y butter mix ever and Mom wouldn't notice."_

_"What did it…" Mai looked at the MRE empanada in her hand, "What did it taste like?"_

_JD cupped his left hand as his index and middle finger in his right imitated spreading butter on it. "Creamy and salty… guilty. So guilty…" She had stopped eating altogether, considering what that word meant in this instance: guilt._

_How can you taste guilt?_

_JD saw the wonder in her eye, slight, but there._

_"I could try to make it, next time I get the opportunity. It's kinda hard to explain."_

_MREs everyday was going to destroy him mentally, admittedly, but he hadn't cooked a proper meal yet in this universe and it had nagged at him. It felt right to share the experience with her._

_"I'll… look forward to it." She nodded, unsure of her answer as they finished their meal and went back on their way._

Mai had appeared in front of the tent again on her rounds, and she stopped, catching JD's eye.

Pop quiz: He heard the slight click of his comm device go off in a pattern as if audio was going to go through, but nothing. He had clicked the controller on the back of his glove for his HUD IFF, clicking his status button three times.

SAY STATUS

ALL CLEAR

Spartan signals, as they were; the language afforded to the super soldiers above him, and now he, alone with her, knew now in this galaxy.

Garrus and Liara had hardly noticed, as was the intention.

"So tell me, Mister Vakarian-"

"Garrus, if you would, Doc."

"Then Liara for you then,"

"Of course."

"How is it being friends with Humans?"

Garrus had chuckled, turning away from JD as the ODST waited with bated breath.

"You serious?" Garrus turned back to Liara. She was, looking at him with those bright baby blues. Between Tali's teasing and Liara's utterly captivating face at that moment to him, he had an interesting day so far. He always had a weakness for women. "Ah, well, I've only had an extra few days experience with them in general, like this. There weren't many in C-Sec."

Liara glanced at JD. "Curious. You seem comfortable around Chief Durante-"

"JD." The man corrected.

"…JD."

"As if you've known him longer than this time with him."

JD had honestly blushed behind his helmet considering what evidence he would give to that. It was a lot. Every time Garrus would interject conversations and topics of some raunchy, innuendo-filled story from his time in the Turian Navy JD would chuckle and smile along with it, picking at him with almost comfortable precision. Likewise, Garrus would tease JD. Tease him on just about everything. His napping, his funny use of his hands with Mai, how easy it was to break his silent stoicness when prompted.

Garrus was very Human.

_"Well, Spirits JD, you almost had me fooled there." Garrus had espouted as JD shook his head after a joke was told, holding back a laugh. "You're actually just a regular guy."_

If only he was, he told himself.

Garrus held his head back. "Us Turians, Liara, you listen up too JD… We're a martial culture. A lot of us Turians in the galaxy right now, we all share the same base experience of our training, of the military and service. We find comfort, I guess, in people that share the things we've gone through. I think that would be the same with anything, between any friends, but JD here, he's a Human that shares something with me, and I think that's a bit special."

It was JD's turn to look away. Maybe it was Shepard's own verbiage, her own way to connect to people, that was spreading throughout the crew. For a moment he thought he heard Shepard in the way Garrus articulated the why of them.

"Oh? What would that be?" Liara hadn't known. JD had answered.

"Our fathers, they were-" _Were. _"both higher up cops."

"Interesting." Liara mulled in her head a bit. "I see. I suppose I just find it hard to believe that I would be friends with someone like the Commander… We are," she corrected herself. "It's just that she is known for so many things, and capable of so much greater, how could I possibly share anything with her?"

It was something that was felt throughout the entire crew as Shepard did her daily rounds: how seamless it felt to make a connection with her, to know that she really cared about them. How did that happen? How did that work? Those were the questions Liara thought about in her academic head.

Perhaps the tragedy of it was that everyone else had been so cynical about actual, emotional connection that when it happened there was skepticism about it.

JD understood that at least. It was tough maintain any connection in a position where people died young and reunion was in death.

_"Chief Durante, I need you in the main prefab."_ Over their radios, it was Doc. _"Need your meat eater face on."_

JD polarized his visor again as he picked up his weapon, on the floor, slinging it over himself. "On the way."

Silently, Liara and Garrus had looked at each other as JD left. It was true, Mai had been astute, so much of a soldier that it imposed. Silhouetted against the exit, a man in black never before seen in that universe, the two had wondered if JD had known he was liable into falling in her steps.

* * *

It was a simple enough patrol path: To the Normandy, through Zhu's Hope, and then to the Mako garage downward. Her stride had been fast enough to have done it in short order at least a dozen times so far ever since Shepard had left with her fireteams.

With her on vigilance the Hitmen remaining had confided in her the practical trust to simply remain at Zhu's Hope and clean up, to help the infrastructure of the colony reacclimate to peace.

Even then her help was appreciated.

"Uh, yeah, thanks Chief Gul… Christ, what do you lift?" Bannon in her sing song accent had been astounded with several other Marines looking on.

Several pieces of rebar about the size of a Mako had been dragged off and away into neat piles by her, Marines looking on.

She mulled about as the last piece of steel, having been blown off by a Geth rocket launcher in an earlier engagement, was placed asides.

_With armor or without?_

Without. "Thousand pounds or so, if needed."

There were Spartans that could do a factor more than that number: Scorpion tanks that, if flipped over, could've been thrown back into shape all by a heft from those that were like her. Not that she had ever done something like that. The most she had ever done had involved punting a Wraith off a cliff and punching through a building. Those displays of strength hadn't been her usual MO.

"You're shitting me." Bannon replied in shock.

Mai simply shook her head, getting the metal particulates off her gloves as she spotted JD leaving the medical tent set up.

He had turned before he saw her, noticing her green blip come up on his HUD and approach.

"Mai."

"JD."

"Doc wants me at the main prefab."

"Mm."

They walked slow, in tandem, amongst the smoldering Zhu's Hope. "Not your type of mission?" JD had made the quiet comment.

Missions that brought her to colonists, to prefab towns like this, they had always meant to destroy them whole for resisting the UNSC and the war effort.

"It isn't." Distantly the sound of the Mako's gun opening up, the occasional loose battle chatter, it had filled their ears about what Shepard was doing. Everything was going fine without them. If Anderson had intended for them to act in this capacity if the world turned his way, perhaps then, this wasn't so bad. "Do you mind?" She gestured to him, slipping back as if following.

He considered before entering the main Zhu's Hope prefab. "Not at all."

There were more than enough Marines on hand to maintain security, and given that Hitman had absolutely wrecked resistance in that tower there was little worry. If anything, it had been the colonists that had been more edgy trying to move things along.

Like the insides of the ship, the main Zhu's Hope prefab had been one all the same, various sections converted to different concerns of colonial matters. Loke had been in one such section, filled out with consoles with her back on the floor and beneath its frame, toying with wiring.

"Everything's alright, we swear it. If you could just finish up, we don't need you to attend to us like this." The colonist looking over her as she worked with fixing some burnt out fixtures had been tapping his foot, impatient. "There's really no need."

"Just take the help, sir." Loke had breathed out as she tilted her head down and saw the two spooks make their way through the hall. "Besides if I rush any of this I'll do more harm than good."

"More harm than good?!" The man was exasperated. "_You've been hurting_\- Shaking this tower for hours! It might just come down and you know what happens?!"

"It's already ruins, sir. We'll move." Loke had sternly answered back.

Hollis Blake was a stern man, but then again anyone outside the wire as far as colonial industries was. To say that he was even now meant something. Meant something in the same way that Mai had been lethal when compared to her peers.

"I already told Commander Shepard, all she needs- all we need, is time away from all of this." Hollis Blake had been the closest thing to a doctor in Zhu's Hope at the moment, Shepard had talked to him earlier. His wife had been in the bedside in what had been, originally, the doctor's quarters on the Zhu's Hope ship. He was heard before JD and Mai had even approached, raising his voice, talking it out with Doc.

"Normally I'd agree, time is necessary for any recovery, but she's very obviously in pain right now, at this moment. I can do something about it." They both look frail, beat down, but that was standard for the colony as of current, but his wife on the cot in that metallic room had looked something fierce, hands at her head, her throat vibrating with groans. There was a strain to Hollis Blake's eyes as Doc put his foot down, only intensified when the two armored soldiers that had been JD and Mai appeared in the doorway.

"Problem?" Mai had asked.

Doc had been a little surprised that she had come as well, but it was actually a positive.

"Nothing at all, I'd just like Mr. Blake's consent to try and help his wife here."

And Mrs. Blake did need help. No language came out of her but that of pain, the most pain of the group.

"Was she actively defending the colony?" JD had noted. She seemed clean.

Blake had been standing in front of her, arms crossed, eyes glaring. "No, no. But all the loud noises, the shocks, they must've been hard on her."

"Well then, we'd like to help that pain."

"I don't think she needs anything."

"Where, where am I? Who am I?" Her voice had been clear as day as she looked, eyes wide open at the ceiling. Then her groaning, her screaming, her thrashing on her cot leaving nothing but her grasping at her head, clawing at her face.

It didn't take long for the three Alliance members in that room to decide that very much so she did need something, Doc motioning for JD and Mai to strongarm. Walking forward into the room Mai had did her best impression of cracking her knuckles through her techsuit.

"Alright, you're a replacement medic, I'm an actual doctor, and my prognosis is that I don't think you're qualified to tell what's wrong with her." The way corpsmen in the battlefield took command over medical matters, there was a grit to it that was born out of saving lives by any means necessary. Even if it meant strong-arming the locals. Especially if someone was screaming. "Alright enough of this horseshit, move outta the-"

One of the first lessons they taught about battlefield awareness: never let anyone get on your six. Something JD had neglected as he saw the shadow of a man with a block held over his head. Halfway turned JD could only see it had been a crate coming down toward him.

The crate was broken over JD's head as he felt his skull bounce against his helmet, turning around to the angry male colonist that had done the deed. The drag, the stench in his nose of blood and some undeniable sour taste in the back of his throat. He'd done this enough, and woken up from it more than enough, to know what this was as every inch of his body became five times heavier. The desperation of him as he held the stock of his SMG and swung it against the skull of the attacker in turn had been the least he could do as, after the solid thwack, he followed suit.

* * *

"You didn't have to die for this, welp."

Wrex had held the armored collar of a Krogan, dying before a VI.

The Krogan Commander who had come along with the Geth had been sucking in blood through his lungs. A Krogan's body was resilient, but not unkillable. Punched through by about six different guns, his armor had been swiss cheesed with the flesh beneath that. Still the fact that he had still be fighting in his last moments, reaching his arms to try and grab Wrex's neck, it meant something.

"Means to an end, Urdnot Wrex." He bled through his mouth. "Saren he will give our people a future. Even if we have to do his dirty work for now."

"What then! What is he offering!?"

The Krogan died, then and there, tongue out and eyes rolling back in his head as the rest of Shepard's Hitman detachment cleared that room.

ExoGeni had been there, unknowing of Zhu's Hope survival, held in a bunker of their own as they waited for reinforcements that would never come from Corporate. Shepard had more than entertained them as she had rolled up with a platoon of Marines, ascertaining the situation handily and going off. Her reputation preceded her, the authority for their mission: to clear the Geth, to investigate, took precedence over the concerns of private investigations.

It was hard to talk her down when there were so many Marines in tow and the manager in charge such a push over.

That wasn't to say they didn't offer their help in the end.

"Going to standby mode and logging off, user Elizbeth Baynham." The VI signed off as it deactivated.

What ExoGeni did know of Zhu's Hope however justified the steel cold look in many of their eyes.

A few Hitmen had remained with Shepard as the rest cleared out the HQ of Geth, a sound of an entire Geth dropship being punted off the side reassuring, if not ominous given the way Shepard collected herself after a very revealing conversation on colonists being used as experimental fodder for a being known as-

"The **Thorian **might be the cause for why all the colonists were acting strange." Kaidan had said it first, out lout.

"Might? _Is, _lieutenant." Ashley had chided him, looking at the dead Krogan as all eyes, eventually, settled on Shepard.

They remembered who she was.

What had been done to her.

_"Stand up! I said stand up!"_

_Those supposed Cerberus scientists were on some backwater world, performing, outwardly, research on geothermal energy development. A reason for them to be looking at the ground, looking at the dirt beneath them all. Shepard never found out what they really were, yelling at them as they cowered before her team of N7s. She told them to stand, and she forced them to do it._

_They fell again seconds afterwards, and then they left._

_In and out, less than thirty seconds._

Here she had the discretion, and the rank, to not be as discreet. Though that was the darkness in herself speaking.

"Commander?" It was Kaidan, and Shepard had been standing still for several seconds after the VI closed off.

"Hm? Oh, yeah. Shit."

The needs and the duality of Special Forces work had summoned two versions of herself inward. The Shepard that tried to be a good person, and the Shepard that had to kill for a living. Did good people kill?

Tali had helped put a bullet in this Krogan, her shotgun smoking still, and she looked down on the body and instead only saw something that hadn't been a Geth.

Shepard went to her earpiece, "Zhu's Hope, how you doing?"

_"Not good!"_

The sound of a riot breaking out in the background had been the proof of that.

* * *

There were things about JD that did impress Mai in the empirical sense. She knew of ODSTs, fighting with them through her times against the Covenant on battlefields she did grace. For all their bombast there was something to them that did strike above the average GI. The tenacity of men and women who would throw themselves into steel coffins toward the planet behind enemy lines. They had been the best the UNSC had before her predecessors came.

JD had his qualities. He was honestly impressive with a handgun; kinetically there was a flow to him that spoke to a supreme comfort with skirting that line between life and death. Shock trooper was right, for it shocked anyone who had seen the opening punches of the fight to see him take a crate to his head, only to get in one last swing that also took down his attacker and he go down face first on the dirt, the man who did the deed collapsed on top of him.

It was guttural sound that came from Mai's throat when she saw JD get knocked out, having not noticed the man rush into the room behind him with a crate and break it over his head. Almost as guttural as the sound of her skidding the very metal beneath her boots and twist around back to the hallway as Doc, also halfway turned, had been tackled by Blake.

JD had hit the ground in a hard thud as Doc was blown back by Blake's tackle, though the struggle didn't last long as Doc's back bounced against the metal. Harder still was Mai's steel boot against Blake's ribcage, kicking him, flying into the opposite wall of the prefab with a dent.

Outside, back in the medical tent, all of the laid down defenders had started groaning at once, moving in their beds as they cast asides IVs and splints, rolling off their cots as Garrus and Liara sat still and, as their great groans started in unison, decided that they should also be moving. Dead eyes, walking toward them like husks.

Garrus had seized Liara's hand, she petrified as she was dragged up. "Yep, nope, c'mon."

Liara had shrieked however, a pair of hands finding her boot: the man that she had just put to sleep seizing her leg as she was jerked in two direction, Garrus swinging back and bunting the side of his arm against his hand, letting her go as the two dashed outside of the tent.

In broad daylight, it wasn't anything that could be hidden. Though it wasn't supposed to be. Not as one of the Hitmen who had been busy hauling food supplies and water had been tackled from behind in a great crash. It took several of the Marines by surprise, unsure of what was happening.

It was a good idea that all the guns were confiscated temporarily as the colonists were treated, but still that had left more creative uses to be had as, all at once, the colony rebelled.

Hitmen, up and down the colony, had been thrown upon as they were tackled, hit with rocks and blunt objects.

"Spirits." Garrus had been a part of many brawls in his time, this had read of one.

Out from the main prefab a main had been thrown out impossibly far, the great metal beast that had been Mai having, raging, appeared with another colonist over her shoulder, only for that man to be tossed asides like a ragdoll.

_"Zhu's Hope, how you doing?" _Shepard, over the radio.

_"Not good!" _Garrus and Liara in their moment of not being involved had been charged to answer.

Doc had been back on his feet in the main prefab, having hauled JD's limp body into a corner as Loke had dealt well enough with her assailant based on the fact she had dumped his knocked-out body on the floor. "We'll take care of him Chief, go!"

And so, Mai was given her grace.

She had burst out of the prefab's main doorway into the center of the colony, only to see what had been the beginning of a brawl. Colonists, dirty and battered, throwing themselves with such ferocity upon Marines. The Marines could only respond in kind by grappling, by fighting, by punches and kicks and grabs.

"Fuck you let's go!" One of the Hitmen yelled out as he threw himself into the stomach of one of the standing colonists, slamming them onto the ground as Harris, the team's autogunner, had three jump on his back and bring him down to the ground. There was nothing more tragic than a Marine pulling punches, and that's what many of them did as they were there, confused, but then up and meeting the challenge as safely as they could.

Punches, kicks, grapples, the dust of Zhu's Hope was turned up as battered men and women threw themselves into the fray again. Hitman, that far with Shepard, had seen Mai fight. They knew that she would do more than dust, she would make the earth move.

Spartan Time.

Footsteps on her right, her rifle not yet up or ready; a colonist had been rushing at her with a wooden board swinging down. Her knife had come out to meet: piercing right through the wood and stopping its swing down the colonist had only been chest to chest with Mai. She looked into his eyes, his tired eyes, and saw nothing. No fear, no anger, just calm.

Odd.

Her free arm had come into his face in a swipe, she hearing a crack as the man's body crumpled onto the ground.

Another one had been rushing at her from behind, her leg kicked out behind as she felt the hard impact of a chest caving in at her boot. There were more where they come from as Mai had found herself surrounded, and hardly a care in the world as she let her rifle stay limp and faced them all down. How the hell were these colonists braver than any Insurrectionist? A question on her mind as they all threw themselves upon her, and the Spartan that she was beat them back.

There was an unspoken ROE established when Mai threw herself into the mass of colonists, without a weapon, three men throwing themselves onto the Spartan hardly doing anything but offer themselves to be thrown. That ROE was, in a sense, non-lethal.

The police officer within Garrus sought differently as the groaning colonists that were coming out of the medical tent had reared their groans at them and he had protectively barred his arm in front of Liara.

"Get on the ground! Or you'll stay down!" Liara had heard what it was like for Garrus to return to being a C-Sec officer. What it was like for him to hold his gun and command for the sake of peace looking toward the sickly and the wounded with a gun and realizing this probably wasn't it. No reaction, no regard for the gun. "Aw, Spirits, fine!"

His C-Sec gear had still been among his kit, brought with him to the Normandy. Out from his battlebelt was a small stick, that, when he had pressed upon it, had gone the length of his forearm. A black baton, extended out, held in one hand as he holstered his pistol. This was how Liara came to know of Garrus's reach and flexibility as he had started swatting at them like he was trained.

She looked around them all and it seemed of slow motion, on how this type of combat had erupted around her and everyone was all hands and legs, limbs and bodies in motion trying to subdue or hurt outright. Her hand had ghosted at the holster on her leg but had yet to pull at it as she had been put in place to cover Garrus. It wasn't asked of her, but she knew it. She couldn't let anyone down as her heart rate rushed and she tried her best to keep it in her chest.

"Oh god, it hurts, so so, much!" A stumbling man, coming, stumbling to her, slowly as his colony fell apart. It was Fai Dan. "I tried to fight it, but it gets in your head!" He held a pistol, up against his head, trying to hold it all together as he kept moving toward Liara.

"Please-! Stop!" Liara's voice had croaked as she raised her hand at him.

"You needed to leave! You're not supposed to be here! **She's not supposed to be here!"**

Fai Dan charged Liara.

A gunshot, loud as hell, like a hammer going through teeth.

Liara, despite herself, felt as if she had been the one that had been shot as a red splotch appeared, dead center of Fai Dan's body, spreading out as her hands moved on their own and she pointed and clicked. It was a shot through his spine, and gravity reclaimed him as he crumpled onto the floor.

Liara joined him as she puked on the ground.

* * *

A gunshot. It rang out in Mai's mind as she held her fist above the man on the ground, looking up at her with an unnatural anger, empty eyes. To be engaged, you must engage. Someone saw fit to open fire, so would she.

She had dropped all pretenses as her DMR, limp against her chest by a sling, had been seized and held at an angle, aimed down. She drew Human blood again on another Human colony. The more things change the more they stayed the same.

She had backed off the blood splattered ground and stood, for all intents and purposes, in the middle of the colony amongst all those who remained fighting. Any colonist who had still been standing, their lives were forfeit as Spartan Time kicked in.

Snapping from target to target, even to colonists attached to Marines, her aim was true as a rapid-fire procession of gunshots rang out.

Men and women fell, their insides ripped out of them and cut through by bullet as the full tenacity of a Spartan was applied in pinpoint, hyper lethal precision.

"Stay down! Stay the fuck down!" Marines had screamed at those already subdued. But those that had been put down were never to rise again. Their yells had turned into begging on their behalf.

One by one the Marines had looked to Mai as she gunned down all those that opposed, without mercy, without fumble, like a machine. She held no opinion of it, and for that, the Marines were floored. There was no emotion to killing Humans in her.

A long time ago, in a fiction that mirrored reality's horror, this was said:

Judgement. It was judgement that defeated people.

Mai was party to no such thing.

The moral quandaries of why these colonists had been fighting and the act of putting them down had been, by design, irrelevant to her.

"What the fuck-?!" A Hitman had known now what the inside of man's head looked like from five feet away, and how unreal it had been as in the colonist's hand had been a glass shiv, cutting into his palm. He had every right to be killed and Mai seized it with an iron grip.

There was no hesitation, no consideration after the first shot was fired.

The Mako had barged through the garage door below after an explosive cannon shot, pieces of Geth beneath its tires.

"Gunner! Load the rounds!" Shepard had yelled through the driver's seat, the Hitmen in the back had passed the gas canister into the manual loading mechanism of the Mako. A souvenir from cooperating Exo-Geni.

"Up!"

"On the way!"

The upper deck of the garage of that led to the skyway had been full of the colonial defenders who had been watching it over, but they had been shell shocked by the initial burst, the Mako aiming up at them as a canister was fired from its gun, impacting the roof above. In a smoky eruption, the garage was filled with gas.

The helmets of the Hitmen, of Tali and Wrex, were all sealed and tight as the doors of the Mako opened and they all came rushing out.

"Get down on the ground!" They yelled where the colonists had been.

There was perhaps no need as the colonists had fallen, weapons dropped besides them, their faces glazed over like dolls. Tali had cleared over them in line with Hitman, holding her aim down at them as they were clearly passed out. For a brief moment, in the spectacles of one of the fallen colonists, she had seen herself and paused before moving on.

"This is Hitman 1-Actual to Zhu's Hope team, how we doing?" Shepard had thumbed her comms as she made the hand signals for the rest of the group to move up, clearing the garage proper and moving up the pathway to Zhu's Hope. They all had heard that burst of DMR fire. It had been Mai.

_"Threat pacified! We're clearing the colony and consolidating the survivors! What's going on Commander?!" _One of the Hitmen that had stayed behind had reported, panted.

"I'll brief when we reconnoiter. Let's go people!"

Inside of Zhu's Hope the guns were out now, Marines who were able to stand affirming their statuses vocally, clearing out every tent, every corner, every rubble.

"Normandy, be advised, colonists are considered hostile. Pacify as needed." Doc had sent over the radio as he pulled up another cot besides Mrs. Blake, transferring JD to it and feeling for the pressure switches of his helmet, releasing it off of him and passing his omni over. "Not too shabby, kid." Flashing a thumbs up at Loke, who had been holding the hallway in, she had nodded, pushing out to secure further.

"Copy all, Hitman." Pressly had responded back promptly, Joker had looked back from his seat concerned, but there had been a handful of Hitmen outside still on guard.

"Alliance not too popular out here ma'am?"

"Something like that Joker." Shepard had fallen behind her pointmen as they stacked against the doorway into the colony, waiting for her go. She gave it in a flick of a hand. "This is 1-Actual, everyone get their helmets on and sealed now! We are entering the colony from the garage way!"

From one of the walkways the first of Shepard's Hitmen appeared, gas canisters in their hand as they tossed them into the colony, raining down below as gas spilled from them. Mai had looked up momentarily, one of said canisters bouncing off her shields as she continued clearing with only her own confidence assured.

Garrus had looked down upon Liara as she had still been barely cognitive. Her first kill. He knew what that was, reaching down to her hip and finding the breathing device that had come with her kit, pressing it onto her mouth after wiping it down with his own gauntlet. "Breath easy, T'Soni. Deep breaths. Deep breaths."

"Friendlies!" Kaidan had yelled out, as Shepard's group entered the colony proper, attaining visual of the rest. Mai had climbed atop the main prefab, looking down upon it all, ready to put a shot into anyone as those colonists that had been subdued non-lethally took in the gas and their struggling had ceased.

A quiet calm fell over like the gas itself.

"Friendlies!" Several of the Hitmen that had stayed behind had said, linking back up as Shepard ran to the center of it all, gun up. Blood ran on the ground, bodies still twitching as the gas seemed to burn the innards of those exposed by goring.

"Shit. What happened here?" She looked up at Chief Gul.

"We were engaged." Mai had answered pointedly over comms. "We could only respond."

"They just, fucking, started brawling with us." A Hitman who had been present on guard duty had panted, at his knees with several of the beaten colonists below him.

Shivs, wooden slabs and metal pikes. It was enough to justify.

Shepard wasn't to say anything, the Exo-Geni officials back over hadn't given her a choice anyhow.

"We good!?" She called out.

"Clear!"

"Clear!"

"We all up?!" She asked outright aloud.

"Chief Durante's down!" Doc had responded over radio. "In the main section."

Sticks and stones broke bones, and crates to the head took even shock troopers down.

"Shit, okay. Secure the perimeter! Tag and bag! We'll debrief the second this fog carries through! Garrus?!" Shepard had yelled out for Garrus as doors were kicked in and cover was pushed asides, bodies, both dead and alive, dragged into lines and rows.

"Commander!" Garrus had yelled out over comms, responding.

"You got the cuff-prefab model in your inventory?" She gestured to his wrist and omni as she followed the sound of his voice and found him over Liara. Kaidan had been behind her, rushing over to the Asari and bracing her steady to a stand, carrying her off.

Garrus had flared the tool, some cuffs had manifested out of his omni. "I'm no rookie, Commander." He had in his time in C-Sec been in a riot or two, so it worked out as Shepard let a nod go and he had immediately gone to work cuffing those who were down.

* * *

When all was said and done, about half of the colonists had been killed and the other half beaten within an inch of their lives. Now Chakwas was warranted on scene, arriving with the geared-up assortment of the Normandy's medical crew.

It was a fight that hadn't been more than a few minutes long, and it was honestly impressive Shepard had crossed the distance between her destination into ExoGeni HQ and returned.

"There was a group of ExoGeni personnel, between there and here. They helped out." Was all Shepard could say as the Hitmen that had come with her seemed… humbled, out of a lack of better words. School circle again.

A lot more commanding, a lot less hospitable. Zhu's Hope had become a lot less colony and a lot more active hot zone. One of the colony prefabs had been covering a staircase down, lifted up by a crane as Shepard had put a squad with only one task: Look down it, make sure no one in or out.

"What're we dealing with?" One of them had asked.

All in all: Some of organic hivemind like creature with the ability to influence and control lesser organics who would come to be exposed to its spores.

"Lovely." Bannon had responded after Shepard's explanation, one that was being passed around the ground team. Being one of the soldiers on point, Bannon hadn't minded. It was her kit that had come with a flamethrower.

"Aye." Shepard nodded, "Keep this held, we're gonna extract who we can and then do something about it."

Data was being pulled from the colony, those Marines not on guard essentially consolidating and wrapping up the colony. There was no way it was going to stay, not like this, and not with how many had been killed. Kaidan had been in charge of that effort.

"Just bounce the message out alright Joker?" Looking over body bags he really didn't want to deal with his theatrics, and even he got that.

"You owe me for postage." Joker could only respond.

The message that was sent out for a rendezvous with the Normandy ASAP to transfer survivors and bodies. Unceremonious, grisly, but it was a reality of QRF missions that, if QRF was called, the colony had been destroyed anyway. This was no different, albeit the pretenses had been odder, more anomalous. Chakwas had been more scientific about it as she had given observance over the knocked out survivors.

The gas had wracked through the colony and filtered out at that point, but the reason everyone had their helmets on was the threat beneath their feet, apparently.

"If I do remember rightly," Chakwas had started as Shepard looked down on all of them. "Based on their neural readings, they very much are stuck in the same type of coma that you were, after Eden Prime… Just an overloading of the mind." Wearing armor and having a pistol on her hip hadn't been quite as familiar to her, but she had glanced at Liara and remembered that at the very least she had been in the service.

All of the killed in Zhu's Hope had come from Mai. All save for one: Fai Dan.

He had been killed by Liara. GSW through the spine.

Her first kill. Not a uniform soldier, or a bandit or thug, Geth or otherwise. A living being, a man with a face.

Chakwas had nudged Shepard, "I can take care of this. We'll transfer the bodies and the unconscious to the Normandy along with the more wounded Hitmen."

Shepard's mouth thinned into a line behind her own helmet. How many rookies had she seen like Liara right now? Sitting on a crate, face in hand, realizing what a life was worth: a pull of the trigger. "Thank you, Doctor."

Around her her men and women were at work, busy, but still very much at war. With the Geth threat more or less dealt with now came the threat that had been more, distinctly, Shepard's area. The one that charged her to become a Spectre. The mysteries of the universe again had been at her feet, but even then, she had her priorities as she came over to Liara, letting life around her continue on. She had passed by Ashley on the way over, and after a non-verbal nod, the two women had known to empathize.

"Hey there, Doc T'Soni, doing alright?" Ashley had been casual to a T, but it faltered as Liara had barely looked up. The pistol that had done the deed had been between her feet, Shepard picking it up, deactivating it.

Chakwas had been moving with Hitmen back to the Normandy with body bags and prisoners, Kaidan overseeing with his own group as a choice group kept looking down the stairway.

Liara had jerked herself on the crate, face coming up from being buried from her hand to see the two women before her.

"Oh, Commander, Williams…." She said their names softly, recognizing them. "I'm… alive?" She tried to put on a smile, placating, but it faltered as she saw the bodies being carted away.

"People should be more than alive." Shepard had said with as much warmth as she could gather with her voice.

Liara had gazed at the black bags that the Normandy had given up and Chakwas had been attending to, only to look up at Shepard's green eyes. Fai Dan's browns had remained however in her memory.

Williams saw the irony, down to Earth as she was. "Someone's responsible for all of this."

Liara was looking for another woman, if she could be called that, the armored figure in the shape of a titan. She was not there. "I'm going to be alright… My work, my life's work so far, it has been nothing but the studying of dead empires and killed people. I should be more familiar with this." Her fingers, gloved still, touched upon her lips, dry and chapped. "I wonder what my mother would think."

For a flash, Shepard's empathy was wiped off her face. Not by Liara's fault however; it was something within her at that moment. "Thank God there were no children." A hand had drifted around her own hips; her thumb tracing circles around her midsection anxiously.

Ashley had kneeled before Liara. "Was that your first kill, Doc?"

The Asari nodded once. "Unfortunately."

What could anyone say to that? Generations of military blood in her had failed anything Ashley could turn up herself. The experience of killing was the same across many aliens, then. Shepard had wanted to open her mouth but had held back as Ashley and Liara found themselves eye to eye. This would be a good experience for Ashley: to level herself with the Asari.

"It's not supposed to be easy Doc."

"But it was." Liara remembered pulling the trigger and every microsecond before and after.

Tali had been attaching a stock to her shotgun by some brought over ammo and provisions from the Normandy as Wrex looked on, the two chatting quietly. In a manner of one away mission together there was more in common between the two of them that had been dug up. Garrus had been attending to the prisoners, and it was agreed that he would walk them back with the dead as well.

It left a choice team to clear the rest of the mission out.

Kaidan had spoken quietly to Chakwas before she left, "Might need your help down the way," he thumbed back over toward the general direction of ExoGeni. "Shepard roughed up a few managerial types."

"Oh my." The good doctor had said. "Anything permanent?"

Kaidan shrugged. "You know her history. She doesn't take to these types of people abusing and testing on people."

Cerberus was a shadow over Shepard, hanging over her like an aura of flame. What had been done to her was perhaps the true tragedy; those moments of darkness, when Shepard had been nothing less than a hard-hitting motherfucker with blood on her tongue, it had lasted longer than the Akusze.

She rolled up, the second time, to the ExoGeni survivors, and the ExoGeni managerial staff which had survived, which had known of the Thorian and what it was doing, had suddenly remembered what Shepard was capable of and what mandate she had.

The situation was **resolved**.

"He didn't give you a choice, Doc. You did what was **right**." Ashley had tried in her softest voice. "It would've been irresponsible for you to not take a shot. You were covering Vakarian, right?"

"Yes. It's just… did he really need to die? Did all of them?" Liara gestured to the colony, broken down and bloody now.

Mai had been uncompromising and it had left the stench of death throughout. No one could fault her for what she did, but it still felt wrong: how easy it had been for her.

Ashley nodded a few times. "We don't live in a perfect world… and they were all in pain. Maybe this was a mercy?"

"A perfect world…" Liara whispered. Dusted ground, rusted ruins, broken colonies and the end of the world: put forth on the very dirt they stood on. This wasn't a perfect world, and nothing could be done perfectly. "I just feel like things could've been different. I didn't mean to hurt anyone."

Everyday, Shepard thought about that. How many choices did she really have in this life and how many choices did she make were correct?

"No one ever does." The Commander finally spoke. "The first time I killed someone, Liara… it was… someone I don't remember." Liara looked up and saw her eyes reflected in Shepard's. "Outpost. Pirates, one of my first missions before I even was an officer, I was an autogunner, big machine gun like Harris over there," she pointed at the Hitman with the light machine gun, levelled downward toward the stairs. "I was on perimeter watch and was told to open up if the infiltration team was about to be spotted."

"Were they, skipper?" War stories, Ashley was more than willing to keep it rolling.

"Yeah." Shepard's gaze went deep, into another life. "I opened up into their buildings, top row and… They tell me I wiped at least a squad of them. I never saw any bodies but I just never knew what they looked like, who they were. I think a lot about what good they could've done the world."

Every death was a tragedy. Every death something stolen from the universe.

"I think one of the best things you can do for the dead is remember them. Even if you killed them. Make it up to them, do good in their stead, things like that. You feel me?"

"I-… I do have a lot of life ahead of me to live I suppose, Shepard."

Even behind a helmet Shepard could give a smile, and Liara, and even Ashley, basked in it.

Another Doc, the Hitman Doc, had rung up on comms for Shepard. _"Commander, Chief Durante's come to."_

"Aye, Doc." She had gestured to the prefab to the two women. "I should go." She had readied herself, but not before placing her hand on Liara's knee. "If you need someone to talk to, you know where to find me." Shepard's wink was in good faith, and Liara had known why Humanity had worshiped her.

Ashley had grinned for a moment, laughing for herself. She didn't believe that feeling that Shepard had given off: that pure sincerity and confidence that was instilled in you in her presence, but it even affected her. "You're lucky to be with Shepard, you know."

When Shepard was far enough away Liara had finally spoken again. "I'm lucky?"

It was the best of anyone's platitudes that she could take as Ashley simply nodded solemnly. "Might not seem it, but you are. Now come on, I'll walk ya back."

* * *

"You make an awful imposing assistant, Chief Gul."

Her responsibility after Hitman had returned whole was to not the colony outright, but to an ODST who had taken a hit in the head at the beginning of it all. What vitals she could read from him via their shared HUD systems had said he was okay, but she wasn't so convinced as Doc had hovered over the man. He had taken the hardest hit of the fight.

There was no need to move JD as the rest of the colonists were being collected, alive or dead, back to the Normandy. So, he had been placed on the cot once taken on by a Mrs. Blake, warm and waiting.

He woke up as men of action always do: With a groan.

"See, he's fine. Kinda. I guess." Doc had been hands off with JD much to Mai's tantalizing silence, though as it had been, he was fine as he groaned and shifted his body about. "Stay laid down, Chief…" Doc had gone to comms. _"Commander, Chief Durante's come to."_

Normally when he had waken up like this he had been alone, in ditches, left behind the frontline as the Covenant somehow forgot to check his body. If not that, then on drops gone bad and his pod knocked off course at an angle that was liable to shake him up a bit.

This was better, nicer, and, when looking at the doorway leading in and seeing Mai there on guard, safer. He wouldn't be lying that he had felt a sense of sincere security with a Spartan around.

Battlefield medicine hadn't been a private affair, usually, and all things considered this had been the cleanest on-site triage JD had seen: all to himself as he came to with Doc sitting over him. Though Mai had stood there behind him, her form frozen as her visor stared at him. Her shoulders were tense, square; JD could tell as she stood too much like the statue like form that MJOLNIR turned her into. Without his helmet on he could not hide his face as his own eyes tried to find hers in the black.

She offered; her head tipped for a moment as if she was going to say a word, but reeling back.

Instead her rifle had went lax on her sling and her right hand gone up, index finger pointing at him before going into a thumbs up, her hand then rotating in a circle subtly.

ARE YOU OKAY?

Her visor didn't depolarize, their eyes settling on each other beyond the veneer as they had for days, weeks, months. It felt like years otherwise.

A smile on his face was formed as Doc looked down and away to check something else, giving JD the window to give her a nod.

Her shoulders dropped ever so slightly, her chest exhaling a breath she didn't know she held.

"Whatever this helmet is made out of, it's some tough stuff," Doc had reached around him, palming JD's helmet, a significant scratch on the back of it before putting it away. "Keep it worn, and stay settled for a hot minute. I'll be back."

Doc had gone off to attend to the freshly bruised casualties of the brawl, leaving the two operators to their silence.

"Are you okay?" Again, Mai had to ask, this time in spoken word, just to affirm in the most concrete way she knew. A room between them and yet JD had felt her close.

"I'm fine, Mai." He rubbed the back of his head. "Honest."

She paused a moment, tilting her head even further before straightening.

_"Mai?" _He said her first name and it brought out of her brief contemplation.

**"Jon."**

It was the only way she could respond, followed by a nod as JD was caught with a name he hadn't heard used of him in a long time. A cold shiver, up his spine and in his stomach: It was always JD, always Durante, always some nickname.

Never just Jon, usually, so casually.

Dawn had found that permission.

It'd been over a year since they'd last seen each other.

He missed her, in that moment.

Minutely, Mai had ground her boots against the floor, unsure of what else to say, of what to do with that information: that he had been alright. So she froze up, a death sentence in battle, but here, it had only served to make things awkward as she coughed into her helmet and simply walked off, back to patrolling.

"Chief Gul." Shepard had greeted and passed the outgoing Spartan, sliding into her spot in the room almost instantly.

Compelled for a reason beyond her Mai had stayed in the hallway, within hearing distance.

"How're you doing, Chief Durante?" Shepard had gotten straight to the point.

Like so many times she had asked when doing her rounds, JD had been met with those comforting words. They soothed him in a way he couldn't identify. "Condition green."

"Awfully formal for a spook that got taken out by a crate." A tease.

That had actually forced a laugh out of him as he swung his legs out and over the side of the cot.

"I swear to God I'm special forces, ma'am." There were a thousand things he was never supposed to survive. A box was something he very much could.

"I've no doubt, Chief… Anything to report?"

JD shook his head as he found his helmet at the foot of his bed, he had reached over, but it had just been out of reach. Shepard had done him the service and grabbing it for him, taking it, holding it for a momentary second. It was a helmet design she hadn't known in her life save for JD wearing it, and it mystified her momentarily.

"This kind of gear, is it the future for us regular meat eaters? Seems a little more tangible than Chief Gul's."

As if Shepard was regular.

JD didn't know, in all honesty. "I'm not quite sure if I can answer, ma'am."

The Alliance had kept private comms to Mai about Mjolnir, and he hadn't gotten as much fanfare. Then again it was no surprise. All of his gear was very conventional.

Shepard had nodded, pursing her lips as she handed it back to him, taking it onto his lap. He ran his thumb on the scratches and dent sustained. Nothing he couldn't patch up on his own. It wasn't the first time he had to buff out the wounds of his armor. There was something there however:

A wing, half exposed, marked on his helmet. The paintjob on JD's gear had been fresh, new, when he had boarded the Normandy. Beneath it however had been something however. Shepard noticed.

"Shepard?" JD had looked up at her with those hazelnut eyes of his. They looked so young, distracting Shepard as she looked down on a man who, in the light of the Normandy, seemed so much different. She was young for her part in the Alliance, and if JD was some sort of N, and she suspected he was, he was very young for that fact.

"You all good? Doc cleared you?" She kneeled down before him.

"I'll be fine." He looked at his own vitals at on his omni. "I've been through worse."

She trusted his judgement at the very least, giving him a warm smile behind her own helmet. "When you're ready, lead a team back to the Normandy and decon, you're done for today."

Less action he saw the better, he figured. "Aye ma'am."

Shepard had stood up, holding her rifle, but she had gone to one of her pouches on her belt. "Forgot I had this, by the way. Enjoy."

She had tossed item in his lap as she left, a cheeky grin on her mouth as she walked and out to proceed with her mission.

Mai had been gone before she was in the hallway.

He had only looked down when she left and grinned. He had only brought one pack on the Normandy and it was about to run out.

Lucky Strike was right, taking the pack of cigarettes into his hands and unwrapping.

He wasn't addicted, he told himself, he could quit anytime…

With Shepard left, all it did was leave him.

Doc hadn't said to stay put, but JD hadn't listened to good advice before, finding his footing as he put his weight on his feet and stood up again, a slight headrush putting a little more pain than was healthy to the front of his cranium.

Nothing I haven't dealt with before, he thought, patting down his gear to make sure nothing else had been missing. He had delayed donning the helmet again however. This was downtime, at least for him. With the wrap taken off the white cardboard of the box his thumb had hit the lid, pushing one stick out and being hit with that toasted tobacco smell.

Hadn't had the time to grab a smoke recently, and he felt it at the tip of his tongue, in the way his leg shook somedays as he contemplated sleep and napping over an unknowable something. His father hadn't been a smoker, nor his mother, but in that apartment block there had always been someone on the balcony, puffing their lungs out, probably thinking of their mortality.

He could hardly remember how he started. Like most things in his life, it had started after someone died.

Joel Reiss. Grenadier. Smoked his lungs out, and when the Covenant finally had him cornered, grabbed a flamethrower and suffocated himself and every single Brute that tried to attack him in that building. His ammo, his weapon, his armor, it was taken from him as his body was carted away. Personal effects always remained, but the pack of smokes he had were handed around in honor. That was JD's first cigarette.

This was about his thousandth if he did the math out correctly, walking out of the medical prefab and to the edge of the colony. The Hitmen that had still been up and at it had been ambivalent, glad to see JD was up and green.

The omni-tool had a function for sparks, and it had been enough to light a stick as he drew a breath in of it and felt the soothing haze in his mind and in his throat.

There, and then not. He knew the deal. How easy it was to simply slip into the black of not being alive. He wondered if dying would've felt like that: Being knocked out. A hundred battles beneath his belt and still he was human enough to be taken out by a box against his head.

* * *

"Bannon, any reason why the corps issued you a flamethrower?" Kaidan had asked a question Shepard knew an answer too already. The fire on her gauntlet was nothing less than the fire in her heart manifest.

"Batarians burn. I know how to cook 'em." She answered in her South African accent.

Looking down that stairway into the belly of the beast, a theoretical monster down there, it was warranted. "Seems cramped, ma'am." Kaidan had observed. "Might have to go in slow."

"I can take point, ma'am." The suggestion.

It came from Mai.

All the bombast, all the disregard for her, it shied away, hidden beneath shadows as Hitman kept their distance. An aura they didn't know had been there was now over them like a storm. How easy it had been for her to kill man, it scared them, settled them. It told them who she was to her core. The parts that mattered at least. Killing aliens, people and pirates who were harming the innocent, that was easy. It had to be for the mettle of Marines to exist, because it was right, morally right. Humanity operated on those morals to a T and knew what it was to fight with them.

Mai did not. She did not care or did not know and the Marines, those that knew war and had fought in it, tooth and nail and sometimes almost to death, knew it in their bones.

Emerson and Bannon had taken a look at each other as Hitman's defacto leaders with their attachment to Shepard. They had been told, in the most vague and ambiguous terms by Ryder when they were deployed about Mai, and how she needed to be looked after.

It made sense now.

It made so much sense: How easy she killed.

Despite her precision, there was something indiscriminate about it.

"Ma'am," Emerson started. "Might be a tight fit. Hitman can hold here."

Shepard had the same thought, looking out to those that remained. It was an obvious choice.

"Tali, hold here with Hitman. Wrex, Chief Gul?"

Tali had seemed momentarily dejected, but she understood, finding a position with Hitman as she was taken in gladly.

An interesting choice, the two beasts looking at each other with a pragmatic regard. "Shepard." Wrex had affirmed, moving to her side as Mai did the same, venting her DMR one last time before aiming downward.

"Bannon, if it's not us, burn it." Shepard commanded, and the Marine had only smiled with intent.

* * *

Flanked by the two largest members of the Normandy Shepard had descended down the revealed steps into the belly of the beast.

On away missions, Shepard had made sure Wrex and Mai hadn't been together, but one had been old enough and the other had been as completely and utterly uncompromising with battlefield tactics that, she had hoped, they wouldn't butt heads here in those cramped, dilapidated hallways. There were always bigger targets.

But there was something to Mai that Shepard felt; something that Wrex felt intimately: the thrill of a test, of a new fight. An unknown to someone who had lived nearly a millennium.

There was a temptation there, surely.

If it was to be acted on it wasn't today as Wrex looked down at his boots. "Plants." He said once. This hallway they were going down, it was thick with pollen, with the soft incantation of mildew and organic matter, only intensifying as they kept walking down it.

Hallways were the worst: killzones like nothing else, a conveyor belt to a slaughter funneled down in a gun was trained in the right direction. It was times like this that she had appreciated her innate talents. What had been deep in her blood about her, the very contamination of that new age, had ordained her with abilities far beyond most mortal men. The urge for her to throw up a barrier in front of them, it was felt, however Mai had been that barrier altogether as she had subconsciously taken point.

"Run me down again, Chief Gul, your shields are two-layered?" Shepard had mumbled.

"Kinetic takes the brunt first, then I have energy shielding beneath, ma'am."

"Aye… And you Wrex?"

"I've got thick skin."

Fair enough.

There was a pistol on Mai's hip, and, more than that, her two knives. The one on her hip scabbard had been pulled out as she left her DMR hang on her sling, coming again to put her pistol and knife together.

It was when the groaning started that the three had taken their last, calm, seated breaths, pushing forward as if they were in a literal belly.

Emerging out of that hallway had been something perhaps explaining all their troubles on Feros so far. Flesh, but yet not: organic and pulp. A bubbling mass of bulbs and stalk like breathing sacs. Pollen and leaves encompassing an entire chamber.

Mai had thought of the Engineers of her clandestine past.

Shepard had thought of ancient horror movies where plants had been the monster.

Wrex had really wished he had a flamethrower.

"The Thorian, right?" He grunted.

"They… didn't have any images on file." Shepard spoke trying to look it all up and down.

There was something to the Thorian that betrayed the conception of life to all of them. Even in that alien galaxy, with all the Council races and all of those yet to be found, life was easily recognizable. This was life however, and the way it moved, it seemed… outside of the definitions in its ebb and flow, as it moved, connected to the very bones of the ruins. Fruit was alive, vegetables, the yeast that Shepard made her bread with in her seldom used apartment was alive. To think that this _thing _was alive was to understand that it, more than that, had an effect on the world in a tangible, intelligent way.

It controlled, it influenced.

Much like her.

"What happened up there, was that a side effect of this thing, or intentional?" Wrex questioned, holding his shotgun at his hip.

"I'm not sure." Shepard's assault rifle, she had charged the heating coils, making sure her rounds were hot.

Secretions came from the bottom of that mass of organic tissue, sprawling out from what looked like tentacled appendages, vines, that moved as if alive. Above those vines, held like a mouth, an orifice, Shepard had seen the impression of a face:

Slime shifted, and gave birth as it chuffed and huffed until out of its orifice, a body, a living thing:

Mai raised her pistol and Wrex was ready with his shotgun as in the Thorian's secretion emerged an Asari: green, dead eyes. Eyes like those of the colonists. She looked down on them from where she was spit out: on the same platform with the Thorian to her back and all of its might garnered up.

"Invaders!" She proclaimed, "Your every step is a transgression. A thousand feelers appraise you as _meat_, good only to dig or decompose."

Mai had seen out of the periphery of her eye Wrex's off hand gesture at her, pushing at her. She understood as the two had walked to opposites of Shepard setting up a crossfire.

Shepard had been at the center of it, standing toe to toe with the emerged Asari.

She smelled of leafy greens, somewhat.

"I speak for the old growth, as I did for Saren." A link, a connection. Shepard's inclination to go for her gun was settled as she held her hands at her front instead. "You are within and before the Thorian. It commands you to be in awe."

"I'm not here for you, or the Thorian. I'm here to follow Saren. What was he looking for here?" Of course, there was a broader issue: that the plant mass behind this Asari had been responsible, if in the primal sense, for what had happened to the colonist. It was more ExoGeni she thought responsible however. "I don't want to hurt anyone."

The look in the Asari's eyes were unmoving. "Saren sought the knowledge of those that are gone. The old growth listened to flesh for the first time in the long _cycle_. **Trades were made. **Then **Cold Ones **began culling the flesh that would tend the next cycle. Flesh fairly given; the Old Growths sees the air you push as lies."

"You cannot possibly know where my truth comes from." Shepard spoke the language of her, of grandeur that perhaps that it, her, would understand. "I have seen, what you seen."

Accusation was in the Asari's eyes. "Your lives are short. You know nothing of the betrayals."

A word, in her nightmares, always returned her to the horror of reality. Shepard found it now: "Do you fear the **Reaper**?"

The Thorian seized.

It did.

A hand had curled around Mai's foot, grasping, a pressure through her armor pads that forced her look down and saw the familiar body of corruption, seen back on Eden Prime, emerge.

Wrex had found the same: dust and green colored ashen bodies raising from the ground.

The Asari flared her biotics and, by instinct, Shepard flared hers like a gunshot. The platform was before an edge, leading all the way down to the unknowable bottom. Shepard had pushed her there.

Mai twisted the grip, tearing the husk's hand off as she pointed down at its head emerging from the concrete, putting two shots in before stomping it back in a bony crack. Wrex had shot his shotgun at his feet as, behind them, a group of husks had come running, hands out, sharpened bone ready for flesh.

"Gul! Wrex, hit the deck!"

They did as ordered, their heavy bodies slamming down on the platform creaking as Shepard dropped her rifle entirely and felt the darkness in her hand form. She imagined a lasso, a wave, feeling the bodies of those lifeless forms rush at them with hissing intent, gathering them all up in her mind and-

She yanked back and hit the ground herself, impacting the Thorian with the bodies of husks as they all fell to the floor, the dust of biotic measures floating in the air.

"This is Hitman-1 Actual. We're engaged!"

Mai had pushed herself off the deck as bodies flew above her, clearing a doorway adjacent with her pistol as Wrex growled like the beast he was, ejecting the heat from his shotgun as he looked up at the Thorian and screamed his war cry at it. "We taking this thing down?!" He yelled out.

Shepard gathered herself up. "We're going to make it hurt!"

* * *

The long process of killing a plant had been, as Shepard recounted, hacking their way through tentacles and nodes that kept the entire Thorian tethered to the building, distinctly violent.

Wrex's shotgun was effective against the husks, but Mai had been more surgical, more hands on.

Surgical being that, as one of the husks had gotten into arm distance, she had wedged her fingers into its neck and torn it in two along its head. It was as Shepard was chopping through one such tentacle that she had made the mistake of realizing that Mai was perfectly capable of doing that to something far more alive.

There was a silence to her that betrayed her brutality in all of this. Normally people hopped up on red sand or any other rush drug had displayed her type of killing, but she did it simply because it was what she operated at. Not because she was out of control.

If anything she was very in control as a husk had rushed her and she had twisted it around, a boot in its back as she pulled an arm out of its socket.

"Your blood will be what waters the new generations!"

They had killed this Asari three times already, this being the third as Shepard put an entire thermal sink into her, taking the hot barrel and gauging out a nearby node.

"It's hurting. I can tell." Wrex advised, and there was no doubt about it. The sound of assault rifles droning through organic material had been bounced around with the sounds of groans, reverberating through that tower.

"Need help, Skip?" Ashley had called over the radio.

"Too many cooks in this kitchen sweetheart!" Shepard had yelled out, wiping her visor of green matter.

These husks, more and more spores in the air, war had come in the form of two Humans and a Krogan burning through everything without disregard. Extermination at its best, taking down images of bipedal humanoids and growth.

Each time a large tentacle or a node was chopped away at, burnt down or shot apart, the Thorian sagged, more and more, visual progress told to Mai as she had found the largest of them attached in a stairway.

"Cover me!" She finally said her only words since fighting had started, taking two knives, cutting out a space by its suction pads and wedging her hands in. She had hardly fought nature like this before, though she would never step down from a fight. Even in a fight she was unused to talking, so she found it odd, in the brief second after the first tug, that she had sworn. She had sworn in her mother's tongue: _"Wallah!"_

_A private search on the Extranet, her first on the Normandy after several weeks, had been several meandering transliterations of her mother's voice in her memory. Of that word: Wallah, spoken by her in tough times or exasperation._

_It meant, literally, __**by god **_in Arabic.

_A promise, a demand, that someone would._

A head of one husk had been sent to its torso as Shepard broke her assault rifle over it, and Wrex had taken ones neck and punched it down as they looked up and saw what a Spartan could do.

It was a mass the size of a redwood tree. All Mai had felt was the weight of a car, wedged against the wall. With her feet on the floor she had tugged, and pulled. The Thorian groaned as Mai felt her hands sink into it, and, somehow, the Thorian fought back, sucking more into its anchor. She would have none of it as her entire form basically vibrated with determination, the loud crash and bang that came next jerking her two allies up to see her, with one leg, slam it against the wall and shake the building, creating an indent in the wall that faltered its suction and give way.

Tendrils and suction areas that remained had fallen victim to a slash of her knife quickly as wedged enough of the node off to put her back into it and brace her legs against the crumbling wall. Like a coiled spring, she pushed, and pushed, and the strength of a Spartan was revealed as she stood toe to toe with what seemed to be an ancient being, connected since ancient times, and then win.

A burst of air came out from Mai's back as she lessened, and in one pulse, pushed again, highlighted by dust and debris and she had forced the node off its anchor point and out the way it came.

It tried to reach out again, clawing at the floor somehow, but Mai followed, balling her fists and throwing it into the ground, breaking its tension. Mai pounded the ground, chasing it out, moving the earth, breaking the world with each strike as all the shots of the mako's cannon or every explosive rocket seemed to pale in that moment.

In a word, Shepard could describe this as: Pure, fucking, determination.

As Mai came to the edge she was just short of chasing the Thorian all the way down as a cacophony of rubble and ruin followed in her wake.

Wrex aimed his gun at another rushing husk, but it had collapsed to its knees, its strings cut.

Shepard had been on Mai immediately after the noise stopped. "Chief Gul?"

Mai had snapped out of some sort of battle trance, looking down at the dust cloud. Just another enemy. Just another mission.

"I'm green."

"What the hell is this suit?" Shepard ran a hand, wiping debris and matter off her armored shoulder.

"Classified." Mai turned around, rifle in her hand, and Shepard had been given the stark reminder that she was outclassed. A rare idea, but standing chest to chest with the armored Mai, it made sense: that imposing figure.

Mai saw a motion signature pop up on her radar, and she snapped, gun up.

"Contact that way." She reported, and Wrex had been up there now too, gun up and pointing in the same way.

"Lets arm wrestle, you and me, when we get back." Mai's helmet had barely turned toward Wrex as he interjected. She only responded with two fingers up, gesturing forward. Wrex agreed as the two walked forward guns up.

Around the corner had been a burst sac, frothy and bright. On the floor before it: a familiar sight, keeled over, unprepared. Mai had run up to the Asari, using her foot to force her over, back against the wall and a gun pointed down at her.

"Execute?"

That word Mai had used, asking for Shepard's permission, it was cold.

"You've done enough of that today, Chief Gul."

Shepard shook her head as she put herself in between the Asari and Mai's gun, kneeling down, taking her hand and raising her up as she made sure to look at her eyes: They were alive.

"I-" the Asari started. Same voice. Same voice that taunted them was now bewildered. The designs on her face had been still there, but she was shaken, obviously. "I suppose I should thank you for freeing me."

It was obvious a little bit. The Thorian had been using puppets, making puppets, of living people. It would be no surprise if she had been in the same situation, Shepard thought. "Easy there, how'd you end up inside that thing?"

Shepard took a step back, wary, but her caution was enough as Mai and Wrex relaxed. "My name is Shiala," she said unsteadily. "I serve- served, Matriarch Benezia. When she allied herself with Saren, so did I."

One of the many followers of the Matriarch. Shepard wondered… "Do you know Liara?"

It was a question that Shiala wasn't expecting to be asked, but she took it, nodding once. "Her daughter? What does she have to do with anything?"

A simple checklist in Shepard's mind. "I just want to know if she was working with you… or her Mother, now that you mentioned Benezia."

"Not to my knowledge."

It settled something, and affirmed a little trust Mai had in Shepard that she had not forgotten about her own security issues.

"I don't think Benezia would allow her daughter to be with Saren. She foresaw his influence. She intended the best in joining him, but… we all lost our way. Saren is far more controlling than any could imagine." Shiala glanced back to her organic prison. Like a pod. "I'm sorry, for anything I did."

"Wouldn't be you. Not quite." Wrex gruffed.

Technically he was correct.

"What were you doing? What is Saren doing?" Shepard had asked fast, upfront. She deserved that much after all this time and a good part of the galaxy traveled at that point. "How can an Asari Matriarch, of all things, be persuaded by someone like Saren? They're among the most intelligent and powerful beings in the galaxy."

Shiala remembered very well, looking out to where the Thorian was. The technique, it felt, similar in a way. There was an absence in her head after so many people were there controlling it. "Saren has a vessel. An enormous warship unlike anything I've ever seen. He calls it **Sovereign. **It can dominate the minds of his followers."

"How?" Shepard wasn't quite sure if she could say it out loud what was being implied: mind control.

"They become _indoctrinated _to Saren's will. The process is subtle. It can take days, weeks… as long as it needs to. In the end it is absolute." She paced, remembering how it happened to her, how it felt like a snake in her mind that she accepted as one does a terminal illness.

"Is it Prothean technology?" Shepard asked.

Shiala shook her head. "I am unsure. When Saren brought me before the Thorian, he needed my powers to communicate with something that knew the Prothean's secrets. After he got what he needed, he tried to attack it. Hence the Thorian's… hostility." Shiala remembered who she was talking to in that moment. The Human woman that the entire Galaxy had known at that point: "Saren knows you are after him, and that you are searching for the Conduit. The Thorian was the key."

It was now at the bottom of the ruins. Dead. Hopefully.

"What key?"

Shiala held her head. "Something called the Cipher."

"The beacon on Eden Prime. It gave you visions, as it did Saren. They were visions of a Prothean mind, not for our own understanding. The sum of the Prothean life must be held by those who access the beacons in order to understand it. Their history, their culture, their very existence."

The Covenant, Mai knew more than she was comfortable, even before she had come to this universe. The gods they chased, the religion they died for, and what she was to them: Demon. She had to think like the Covenant sometimes. She had to become their demon. Musings she had and she tried to squash.

"The Thorian would have this?" Shepard asked again. Shiala nodded.

"It has been here before the Protheans, and it will be here after we are. It has taken the sum knowledge of Protheans on this world within itself, as it always has for a thousand histories back. The Cipher, it is the very essence of being a Prothean. To describe it is like to teach someone how to speak without words-" Mai twitched. "Or to breath air without lungs. It is impossible. To understand their visions, you must have their viewpoint."

"It'd be like me imparting on you every battle I've survived, without understanding why I did, Shepard." Wrex said, understanding. The wisdom of his years poking out momentarily.

"Hm. How did you then?" An asides.

"I'm Krogan."

Shiala nodded, agreeing. "I sensed this Cipher when I melded with the Thorian. Our identities merged; our minds intertwined. Such knowledge cannot be taught; it simply exists."

Asari mind melding. Shepard had known of it. Offered it by a mentor, however she had never experienced. Her mind was her own. The fear of imparting her fears, her anger, onto someone else? She couldn't be convinced. Now however something far more important than her history was at stake. "Shiala, you gave this knowledge to Saren. I ask you give it to me."

Shiala had put on a face again, as if she was of the Thorian again, but it was a face of understanding. "It is what I owe you, Commander Shepard. Do you know what it would be like to meld?"

The binds that make us are the threads that keep us alive, held on a tightrope above a cosmic death. Everything Shepard did, she knew, affected someone else, and then that person to another, and to another, and to another, and to another, and to another, and to another, forward and backwards, until the end of time itself. The shared experience of life was just that: a broader idea of what it was like to share a mind, a heart, a soul with another being. Everything she did was in consideration of the Mass Effect. She knew. She knew very well, and was too humble to admit that she could imagine what it was like.

Shepard bowed her head once, sliding her helmet off, letting her full red hair cascade onto her shoulders. She opened her mind and let down her barriers as she closed her eyes. "You may."

Mai and Wrex tensed as Shiala's eyes went black, and something that Mai had only read about transpired: "Embrace Eternity!"

Shepard hitting the floor and puking hadn't been what she knew of it.

Time was relative, Mai would know best every time the adrenaline hit and the world slowed, so when Shiala had taken less than a second and emerged from that invisible meld with a thousand years in her vision, Shepard very much in pain and on the ground, she knew Shiala had been a different woman.

Shepard had hit the ground like a sack, like Eden Prime all over as the two remaining standing at first, thought nothing of it save the immediate distress that, once again, Shepard had played with fire too hot.

It was Shiala that changed it as she looked at Mai with wide eyes. Mai knew the look from so many an Insurrectionist.

"By the Goddess. " Shiala stepped back, not from Shepard as she keeled over, but at Mai. "You're- You're tainted!"

Mai flicked the safety on her DMR. "What did you do to her?!" She yelled out through her helmet at the Asari, but Shepard was not in the picture. Shiala had been stepping back against her busted pod, arms up, hands flared at Mai.

"You are cruelty! You bare the mark of **Thanatos**! You carry a history that is not ours! **Written on you are ancient sins!**"

Before Wrex could intercede, a hand had been risen to him from Shiala, and he had flown with a crash as blue fire flared and he had hit a wall.

"You were the answer **to everything**! You will stand before the Cold Ones and-!" Panic, despair, the realization that what she was seeing before her hadn't been a woman. "There is a **song in your genes** that will be **the last** before the **silence**!"

The several millimeters that Mai had to pull the trigger was robbed from her as her body seized frozen, Shiala raising her up from the ground with all her might as Wrex was blown back from a biotic pulse. Her very lungs were frozen as she was trapped inside her own body; the horror of biotics once again used on her as she was made an object and she felt the blood in her boil.

**"You must die, for all of our sake!"**

This was judgement and execution.

Mai felt it: this was what death felt like again. On the Ardent Prayer, she made her peace to die, and again she did now as she continued to claw at her own body to move. This time however, there was no hope of this thought: her mother, and her body, her remains, would not be there for her to rest with.

She felt her ribs curl inward, but it would not snap as it touched upon her lungs like fire. To feel her very bone bend inward, its steel carved an unnatural line inside of her. Shiala was trying to crush her lungs with its natural cage. It was like a knife, poking at the skin of a balloon.

It was cancelled however by a great force upon her back: More biotics.

"Not before I get a fight in!" The great, pained yell, and Mai flew forward in her frozen state, right into Shiala. The freeze had been broken and Mai felt the blood in her mouth as she sandwiched Shiala between herself and the wall, hit like a sky car. She felt the smaller being crumple and break. The wall had crumbled still, leaving an imprint crater as the two collided, however even before the rock had cracked of Mai had forced herself off and her hand at the Asari's throat, whipping her out of her hole as Mai felt the bone in her neck and held her up in return, helpless to do anything to stop what was coming.

For one selfish second Mai had let the Asari look at her. She would never see her face as all she got was a black visor, showing the darkness that awaited all things.

Mai sent her there as her hand squeezed, and then broke her neck by grip alone. The crack that rang out sending a shock through Shiala's body as she seized in Mai's hand, only to be slammed into the floor besides Shepard, dead.

The Spartan stands above them, holding herself tight as she realizes she cannot any longer, throwing off her helmet and tearing her balaclava off, only for blood to drip from her mouth in a frothy expulsion. She vibrates, trying not to keel over, turning her head to see a limping Wrex as her entire chest burns every time, she breaths.

He was a biotic, she realized.

"Wrex!" It was the first time she had ever said his name.

"What?" He said in his deep voice, groaned and bothered.

"My ribs!" She stands as best she can, facing him, chest out. "Pull them! Slowly! She tried to perforate my lungs with them!"

Wrex is frozen by the ask itself, but realizes quickly. Her usual, monotone, intense voice drawn to a different tone. It was that of need, of desperation, of demand. Who was he to deny this?

"It will hurt." Was all the warning he could give.

"Do it!" She barked back. He raised his hands, hands he had spent hundreds of years killing with, and healed.

She screamed.

The last time she screamed was when she was a girl, in the back of an ONI van, realizing what had happened to her mother. It was a scream that bounced against ancient walls and dead gods, resounding throughout the ruins of a civilization as she felt her very bones get reset. If it was an option, she would've bitten through her own teeth.

At her feet, momentarily forgotten: Shepard.

* * *

Shepard tried her best to parse her vision and nightmares by herself, but in the end, she would fail. On her own, they are nothing but maddening images and ideas that a lesser woman would've gone insane over. There is a clarity to it now, but nothing is revealed. That is the horror: In the end it is all flesh and metal and flesh and metal and flesh and metal turned over and over and over and reaped until the death of time itself and what she could hide behind in ignorance, of not knowing the truth, she cannot shield any longer. There is no greater mystery to her visions than what is before her: The end of life as she knows it. Life, not as in who currently inhabits the galaxy, but life as a concept.

What Shiala gives her sight over she can only transform into images of a Human understanding as she remains in a black void, and the images of the apocalypse are plain to her: It is coming. Though there is something deeper, and she reaches out, and pulls back the veil of her Humanity to find where mortal eyes cannot rest.

She sees God, a black crown upon their head looking down on her with red eyes that see beyond her, see beyond time, beyond anything she knows. She looks back and tries to know.

She cannot. It burns her eyes, tear out her mind, and manifests into a color she cannot understand. She wants to tear her eyes out, but even reaching up to them all she finds is her own flesh, clawing down and down and down like claws as burning pain is her only distraction from absolution. She cannot bare witness to the leviathan of the black any longer.

The visions of the Reapers, of the Protheans, send her elsewhere: to something she can understand. As if her face is put to an angle grinder she is enveloped with an understanding she is forced to carry, to know, to be burdened with. She feels as if a reclaimer, and, all at once, it hits her for one brief moment of clarity. A million gallons of water sent through an opening, and it breaks her, nearly kills her as she feels a pain in her stomach she had long since gotten to know. It burns and drowns her and she knows what it's like to die over a thousand generations.

Pure bile, trying to eject a corruption from inside Shepard that came not from her world. There was nothing she could do but be there on her knees as she saw an Eagle over the world.

Knowledge. A memory and an understanding she does not know takes her over like a blanket, bathing her in darkness before it is taken from her again. All she sees in her mind's eye are the after images, the forms shifting, shadows of intent and false prophets reveal to her and then take away histories and religions and Humanity itself.

Oni.

The Devil. Its over her shoulder and it whispers into her ear the forbidden histories that hang over her.

_She knew._

_ **She knew.** _

For one beautiful, one horrible moment, she knew.

She knew everything. She had it within herself.

The war, the Covenant, the UNSC, of a war gone wrong, and a Humanity gone to war. Gods and Demons, Glassing and Hellfire. The very idea that in another Milky Way, Humanity was marked for extinction and they tried, and they tried their best to fight.

She knew, for one granular, iota of a moment, of every Desperate Measure. Of every soldier sent down in drop pods and every world sacrificed to keep Earth alive. Millions and millions, genocide, holocaust, crusade. Death on a scale suffered by Humanity that she could not fathom, and yet still, they fought. They fought and they fought and they fought and in order to keep fighting they had to-

The city of New Jerusalem. She's there again in an alley, looking at that same van pull up, men fall out and put a syringe in a vagrant woman and seize her daughter. The men in black don't see her this time, and instead, Shepard is given the very idea that this image was real:

It was a memory.

It wasn't Prothean, or Reaper. It was **Human**.

A girl, a baby girl, is in the men's arms.

And then a realization: She dies.

This baby girl dies in a war she is charged to fight in and Shepard feels a great despair that makes her want to reach down her own throat and crush her own heart in mercy.

The vision restarts, and black van pulls up, but this time Shepard is the mother and the men in black approach her. Within her throat she cries out, and words finally escape her in this vision: **"Don't take her, please, she's my daughter, take me instead!"**

They do. She is taken and the daughter, _her daughter,_ is left behind, alone, in that city for herself and Shepard knows the feeling in a place that she hasn't felt in almost a decade. The cruel irony is not lost on her as a million memories pass her by that make her understand that she stands before a million million aliens she has only gotten to know in the past two months, and they all clamor for her head.

She fights a war. A war unlike any she could ever understand for the sake of her daughter, and she believes in it to her very blood. She has to fight a war for her to survive. She has to fight, she has to fight, she has to fight and she has to kill and she has to do it alone because she is the only one that she can trust in.

In a real life second, she fights a war, and when she comes to Shiala is standing in front of her in horror, and the air in her lungs becomes blood and puke and her legs are stolen beneath her as she collapses. There is a piercing pain in her head like a diamond bullet, making its way through her skull in slow motion, and she cannot breath until she forces another life out of her through her throat.

She wants to say words that have no meaning to her. Reaper, Prophet, Insurrection, Chrysanthemum, Sabre, Spartan, Earth and her Colonies, Marauder and Zealots. However as she tries to speak all of it is ripped from her mind, taken from her memories, and she desperately tries to hold onto the ghosts as she retches on the ground in pain, barely alive and conscious. Shepard thinks she hears fighting, and she is sure she hears a neck crack. Shiala's lingering presence is gone from her mind, but she never noticed it in the first place.

The darkness takes hold and she tries to find something to anchor onto just as the Thorian did.

"Ma'am?"

Above her: A Spartan-III, B-312, 26 years old and born on a lonely colony of New Jerusalem. An orphan, kidnapped, told to serve. She did. She did in a way that had made hundreds of thousands die. Her name was Mai Gul. _Power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth._

Blood dripped from the sides of Mai's mouth as it disappeared beneath her helmet, put on.

Death.

She was death, come for her.

Mai looked into Shepard's eyes and saw the same look in Shiala's.

Shepard knew everything now.

**She knew.**

But she had to forget. She had to forget in order to live.

Blood erupted from her stomach again as she collapsed into her own puke, red hair intermingling with the brown grit. The last thing she felt was a reaper, clad in gray, a face of onyx and metal arms, pick her up and take her away.


	25. 1-19: Other People

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These notes are meant for FF.net so don't fret if it's all gibberish:
> 
> I'm sorry I'm not responding to all reviews, but rest assured they are all read and I appreciate them so much. I do have time to address a few things.  
A few of you have noted the upcoming Reclaimer elements I am noting, and, as I stated earlier in the story they will be included to the point where it is not overbearing. Given the state of Halo canon, there are things that have to be addressed in such a story about Halo. One of these, as many have you have pointed out and I have well in hand, is that not only Mai a Reclaimer, but so is JD by virtue of what type of Humans they are. Mai is John-117's equal, and I will do with that what I may.
> 
> Another frank note, I haven't had much in the way of "Shepard defining" moments, but rest assured her time will come. I don't necessarily think that people read this story to focus, explicitly, on Shepard, but the intrigue of this story will, I think, coalesce best around Shepard at her relations to the Halo mythos as I put them in front of her. Also, we don't know much about my Shepard, do we now? I'll be affirming her character, because, remember, we are barely about halfway through ME1 at this point.
> 
> Also as many of you have written to me, yes, Mai holding onto Shepard during the Beacon event has repercussions as we see here.
> 
> Thank you for reading and reviewing, rest assured each of you make this story greater with your patronage.

* * *

**1-19**   
**Other People**

* * *

"Our medical bay is full, we'll have her in her quarters." The second Shepard had been seen on the main deck of the Normandy in Mai's arms, her body seizing, froth at her mouth, there was something implanted in all of the crew that had not seen Shepard fall before the Beacon on Eden Prime. Chakwas had hurriedly ran through the main deck down to the crew deck, straight into Shepard's room as Mai deposited Shepard upon her room. It had been the first time since Mai had been there since Eden Prime, and Shepard had made it her own.

It was still very spartan, however on her work desk, there had been pictures, all taped to the wall behind her personal console. They were of soldiers, squads, from her past; pictures of kids and horses and travels. Heartfelt letters from fans, from those saved, from those that just needed someone to talk to. There were dozens of them, among the first things that she had seen every day. A picture of her family, and a younger Shepard, fresh out of the officer academy, had sat on that desk, and they were all smiling:

A stern, older man with short cut hair and a sunken in face, masculine and imposing but proud all the same had stood next to a woman that had very much been Shepard's mother. A splitting image, almost, but hair gone grey and cut short.

Shepard was on the latter half of twenty-nine, and yet, despite this, as Mai had taken a glance as she set the woman down on her bed, she had lived more lives than she as a Spartan ever had.

"Help me get her armor off." Chakwas ordered,

Shepard tossed and turned, her eyes beneath her lids alive and fighting as her fists closed upon herself and she held herself around her stomach, in pain.

Mai's strength had been, alone, the only reason why that had been averted as steel and nylon, future metals hit the floor and Shepard was stripped further, almost down naked as Chakwas had taken an instrument out of her pocket and snaked it up her shirt, listening to her heart, her insides for some closer recognition of what exactly was happening to her.

The last time she was just out, after Eden Prime. This was more violent.

"I see Jerusalem." Shepard said, chanted, spilled out of her lips like insanity. "**Jerusalem.**"

What Mai had known of the first Jerusalem had been rudimentary, bare: It was where God died.

It made sense to her then why New Jerusalem was Hell.

All Mai could do was just stand there and watch as Chakwas did her work, Shepard's mouth dirty with herself.

The reveal of Shepard's abdominal as Chakwas snaked her hand up her shirt to diagnose, Mai had caught something: laterally, across her stomach, a single thin, muted line. It was a scar. A scar, long across her form, kept there. Shepard's arms, her hands, her legs, they all bore the rough patches and the scars of a warrior. Cuts, shrapnel, bruises and burns. Mai had counted them all. There were many.

How many scars did she herself have? How many scars did JD have, she wondered? For any to have actually beat into her suit, they had hurt and would've killed normal men and women. Even then, her body had become twisted and muted and rough from scars put on her by the Covenant and the Insurrection. Shepard carried her scars, apparently, but that scar on her lower stomach, it was different. Too clean, too uniform, too personal. Not a gut shot, or even a blade. It was too thin for that. Too polite.

Her shirt was pulled down again as Chakwas settled her diagnosis, catching Mai's eyes behind her visor somehow. Chakwas had moved her finger up to her lips.

_Silence._

Mai tilted her head, hand raised up habitually.

_Why?_

Chakwas had looked at her oddly before shaking her head. "I have this from here, Chief Gul. Thank you."

* * *

Comms room, sans Shepard.

Pressly and Kaidan had the command.

Team leaders, official or not. Those not currently occupied with dealing with the fallout of Feros.

Chief Gul, Chief Durante, Lieutenant Alenko, XO Pressly, Engineering Chief Adams, and Sergeant Emerson. Chakwas had still been busy from Feros, attending to Shepard and all those that had been injured. The colonists however that survived were all out cold, like puppets loose from their master.

Spectre or not, Shepard still had an Alliance ship with Alliance personnel and the rule of conduct had survived in their minds. An all Human affair had been in the comms room, post-Feros. Shepard had been missing from that get-together for good reason.

Sergeant Emerson had rolled his arms together as he leaned back into his seat. "I don't think we can maintain an effective command if the Commander is constantly exposed to what she is. The Marine Corps does not engage delusions of the ancient. This isn't what we signed up for."

"I didn't think Hitman had its discretion in choosing what they are tasked for." XO Pressly had pressed upon Emerson.

Emerson glowered. "We are Commander Ryder's operators first, our tasking here was on a directive from Alliance command to support Shepard and keep a watch on Chief Gul and Chief Durante." There it was, out in the open: Hitman had been the Mai and JD's babysitters. "**All of you**. All of you were there at Altis. You know as well as anyone that they aren't Alliance. Not outright."

The uncomfortable truth that the first time the two of them had been on the Normandy: it had been in chains. Emerson had pointed to the two, side by side in their own seats as the rest of the command staff was very much tense.

"You're not Alliance, you're **Covenant**."

How wrong Emerson's accusation was. Mai, sitting blank faced, had hardened up at that moment as JD looked away, not even dignifying the Marine's accusation. Mai had been dressed down, in her Alliance uniform with the techsuit beneath still. In the hours since they had taken off from Feros the Normandy had been a mess; this meeting had been intended to bring an understanding why it was like that.

"You have **no idea** who we are, sergeant." Mai grit, and she stood tall. Without MJOLNIR it hadn't been her seven-foot stance, but at that moment she seemed ten, hands balled, still looking down on everyone there. "If Commander Ryder wanted to _take care _of us, he would've needed more than just a platoon to do so. **Fall in line.**"

He would've needed armies, empires; more Spartans _like her_ to contain.

"I don't take orders from you." Emerson beat back. "Not from someone who can kill colonists like that so easy. You had no right to do the damage you did."

"We were engaged. The results were preferable to any casualties on our end. If you're half the soldier you think you are you've made this call before."

"_Enough." _Kaidan had held his face in his hands. "We get it. Chief Gul and Chief Durante may not be who the Alliance tells us they are. I constrained them for Pete's sake! But they're not our enemy. Saren is!"

"Where I grew up, sir," Emerson said, staring up at Mai. "It's always our own."

How many militia groups? How many men and women of Human blood? Mai agreed, a cruel look on her face. The words that would've flowed from her mouth would've been that of blood and fire and she still tasted her own crimson between her teeth. Though she hadn't. Not when JD had spoken up. "I took an oath to defend _Earth and her colonies_. No matter the cost. I have never betrayed that. Who Commander Ryder thinks we are doesn't matter. **We're soldiers."**

JD spoke with such intensity it betrayed the persona people knew of him: of how quiet the man was and how isolated he had carried himself. And one more thing, "Ryder _**knows **_who we are, regardless. Just think about that." Maybe it was his father in him but he felt the need to get the last word in, like detectives of noir fiction's past.

The dangerous game that all of Shepard's crew played with her: secrets. They had known Shepard despised the thought of them, and yet, secrets were kept by Anderson's now absent word about the two Chiefs from Altis. Somehow their mystery had fallen on the wayside when confronted with Shepard herself.

Her condition was stable, though her thrashing, her high fevers and continued retching hadn't paid well to that idea. She rambled, in her bed, of ancient religions and coming apocalypses: darkness and reapers and tentacles, coming around her and squeezing the life out of her until her very bones popped out. She was stuck in nightmares. However, she fought in her dreams.

**"Glass them! Glass them! Glass them all!"** She would mutter, and it was reported, and JD and Mai would have to face that, somehow, someway, there was clarity in Shepard that betrayed them.

It was quickly becoming apparent however that this wasn't what a military officer should suffer; not while in command that is.

"Commander Shepard," Pressly started. He had always his reservations about what she was bringing on this voyage, of all the guidelines that she skirted and the aliens she brought on, but this went beyond his biases. "By God, do you know what it was like to know that I would be serving with her?"

"Pressly?" Kaidan rose an eyebrow, but the older man continued.

"That woman, the Commander, we've all heard the stories. About all her pomp and power, about how much a soldier she is and how much she cares about her people. She's like a saint to us bread and butter Seamen. So please know, what I'm about to say, I say it with full knowledge and full respect for the Commander," He had prepped himself, straightening his uniform before closing his eyes and raising his hand. "I move to remove the Commander from command of the Normandy, effective immediately."

Adams had been surprised, "Charles, come on you can't possibly mean that."

Pressly was career military, he had known the book like the bible as he had an answer. "Alliance Command states the obvious. If an officer's subordinates believe that they are completely and utterly compromised emotionally or mentally it is our prerogative to relieve her of command. You sit there and tell me that the Commander isn't compromised."

Compromised wasn't the word for it. Mai had the word for it: Tainted.

She had told no one of what Shiala had said. Why? She couldn't be sure herself, but there was something in all of her own indoctrination that had made her feel like that was all _wrong _and _right _in the same stroke.

Wrex had stayed tight lipped about it. Perhaps someone as long lived as he was had seen this again and again.

How often did people of this galaxy fall into their precursor's legacies? Enough apparently.

"Call a vote."

"Aye." Emerson's hand had immediately shot up. "It's nothing against the Commander. But just… look at her." The image of Shepard, of Humanity's golden girl, seemed to shy away with how she was now.

Pressly's hand had raised and Adams ran his hand down his face. "We really can't be doing this."

"I don't want to do this Adams. I really don't. But going by procedure is what I'm charged to do. For Shepard, and for everyone on the Normandy."

Was Shepard currently unfit to continue her command? Adams knew it. He was an engineer. Reading things by exacting terms was his thing, and to go against it would be to put himself in question. He rose his hand and Kaidan's eyebrows had furrowed, only to raise again as a hand to his side raised.

"Really Chief Durante?" Kaidan was surprised. Most people were.

Of all the things he was, he was a by the books Marine at heart. He had suffered enough to know that. JD nodded. "Her mission is important, yes, I believe that. We should pursue it. Though that doesn't mean the Commander has to do it. Not like this."

JD had forgotten how many NCOs or COs had crumbled, had gone insane in the war. So many mentally dissolved when the walls came in and left their soldiers on their own. So many dead because of it. He, of course, survived. It was why he had always let on to HQ to keep him low in rank, favors he had given for the very sake of him not ever being put in that position one day. He couldn't let someone die because he couldn't take command. It would kill him.

So, he understood. He understood more than people there would know.

"Well that's an interesting question then for Chief Gul." Pressly motioned to the woman. "The rest of the section chiefs are busy, but if you vote, we might have it here."

A choice.

How often did she have these things? None on this level.

Mai had been surprised that JD had voted in favor, but in that, it confided in her something of the man. He was still the soldier she had known; the UNSC had raised him up, just like her. Perhaps not in the way it had for her: down to her blood and bones, but it had still put itself into his head and heart all the same. The need for command, for the laws of warfare as dictated by the UNSC that would best engage the Covenant, it was still recognized by him, even transplanted now.

"I… do not think it is pertinent for me to vote in this." Mai answered.

"Well, then, answer this question then: Do you believe the Reaper threat is there?" Mai sucked in her gums as Pressly asked.

"What do you mean, Pressly?" Kaiden pressed on the XO.

"It's simple as this: Shepard is uniquely oriented to take on that threat. Whether or not it's a good thing is up to debate, clearly, but whether or not the threat is real enough to risk Shepard taking this mission on, that is what I'm asking fundamentally."

There was a feeling Mai had, on missions with ONI. There were ONI wetworkers, operators, ODSTs even, who she supported on planets behind enemy lines, in ruins not of Covenant or Human understanding. The reality of the UNSC and the Covenant had been that there were always larger fish in their pond, that the very ground beneath them had been created by someone else. In an apocalyptic war, Mai couldn't afford, if she even wanted to, the thought of a transcendental race being so present, yet so absent in their fight against the Covenant. However here, the Protheans, their absence, it had been front and center. The civilizations of the galaxy didn't build the Mass Relays, or the Citadels. The ruins of the Protheans were public record and plainly seen, so the question came of this: Where did they go?

Liara would've had an answer, Mai realized. She wasn't a scientist and couldn't answer empirically. What she could answer however was what she felt. Intuition.

And she didn't feel like there was anything there.

If it was a threat it would've been a threat beyond anything she could do about it, but whether or not it was true?

Mai ran her fingers against her knuckles.

She remembered Shiala though, her accusations, of ancient sins and cursed genes that she had. The speaking of a mad woman, probably having seen Shepard's visions too. Though there was something in Shepard's visions that had been true:

She had seen her get taken. She had known of New Jerusalem, of the UNSC, vaguely.

She knew that was true. Once, what felt like a lifetime ago now, it had been her reality.

It was as true to Shepard as it was to Mai, and transitively, the Prothean warnings, the idea of a Reaper, it too had to be true.

**"Yes." **Mai answered Pressly after a strained silence.

Kaiden puckered his lips and nodded once, relieved. Wasn't a win, but wasn't a loss yet.

Those that had voted against had seemed dejected, but fair was fair. The results weren't in yet. Joker had pinged the comm room. "We have an unknown signature on the long-range inbound hot. This might be our rendezvous."

"We'll continue this later." Pressly had the conn. The team leaders had moved up and out, but as Mai had gone to stand, there was a fire in her throat, beat down as she coughed once, a jolt of pain going through her body JD had barely caught out of the corner of his eye. She had moved before he could say anything, the team leaders going to the front of the Normandy by Joker and seeing what he saw. Before that however, Pressly and Emerson remained, a moment of time between them.

"Chief Gul… She's a killer." Emerson had let out of his mouth like a frosted breath.

"Aren't all of you jarheads?"

Emerson sucked in his lips as he shook his head. "I mean, yeah, but… I don't know. It's just the way she just _does _it. It's not like a conscious action for her. It's like a snap. She breaths the same way she kills; she just does."

"You good, Sergeant Emerson?"

In his mind's eye he saw the sharpness of a blade, its edge cut down to a degree that could split atoms, slicing across air. Mai was the very essence of that. A blade that simply cut through what was in its way.

"Have you ever pulled the trigger on someone, Pressly?" Emerson asked.

Pressly felt the sweat in his gloves stick. "No." The way he had killed was by being part of the machine that was a starship's crew.

"There's just a moment, before, and after, the hammer falls that you just snap in your mind. Like a picture. It sticks with you, it pauses you, even for the smallest second. It is so infinitesimally small that I sometimes doubt that it's there, but it is, and I didn't see Chief Gul, at all, think about gunning down those colonists. _They were Human_, for Christ's sake."

There was something haunting about Mai that imprinted on the minds of Hitman the second she gunned down those people who looked like them. Something primal; something that clawed at the animal minds in them, and quite frankly Hitman had changed in realization that Mai could not, should not be tested. Held accountable, maybe, but tested: no.

Joker would often recount to Mai about the specifications of the Normandy and how it had always seemed one of a kind to him. She would, at hours at a time, accompany him in the cockpit and learn, gradually, how it was to fly the Normandy. How it flew, how it felt beneath his fingers, he had confided her all of this. She didn't have that particular sentimentality when it came to flying, but she understood. The Normandy was only a machine. One of many even. Example number one of the Alliance's new scout and stealth vessel. The Normandy would always hold the title of Normandy, but distantly, one of its sister ships had blinked into view through the viewing screens. Like looking in a mirror, a Normandy-class ship had emerged and gone nose to nose.

_"This is SSV Ardennes, hailing the SSV Normandy. Normandy how copy?"_

A navigator had mumbled an aside to a compatriot: "The sister ship."

Joker had nodded at the message as he flicked it over to Pressly to answer.

_"SSV Normandy copies you clear Ardennes. Are you transferring the colonists?"_

_"Aye. Beginning docking procedures on your go."_

As the noses of the two Normandys had lined up, side by side, a metal tube had extended from their airlocks, interlocking.

"Could make a docking joke, right about now. But that's too easy." Joker was one of the very few of the Normandy to be a relative ease with Mai nearby, she crossing her arms by him as she stood near the co-pilot seat, familiar with it in her short time under his tutelage so far. "You know any good ones with your hands, Chief Durante?" Joker looked over his shoulder as the Normandy's VI went through its own checks, connecting to the two ships.

_What language do deaf pigs speak?_

_Swine language._

JD shook his head at the man. "Gotta work on your speaking material first."

Mai had risen one of her fingers to her mouth, curled beating back an unknowable… something that JD had risen out of her. She made no sound, but it was something as the rest were concentrated on the airlock.

Joker had feigned a wince of pain at JD's jab, but came off okay. "Shep doing okay?" Joker had allowed JD to lean on his seat. They were friendly, if by virtue of how outwardly normal JD had been.

JD had shrugged. "Not really."

"Shame." Joker had taken off his cap, running back thinning hair. "You'd think someone like her would be untouchable."

"Hm?" JD had turned over to the Normandy's pilot.

"Oh you know. Not many people can talk a terrorist out of wrecking a colony. Let alone a terrorist who attacked Elysium."

It took a few moments, but JD knew what Joker was talking about.

An asteroid last year, meant for mining, had been redirected to hit Terra Nova by malice. Shepard had been there to respond to it. Batarian terrorists who had been vengeful after Elysium, after what Shepard herself had done to them, came face to face again with her. Reckoning came. The details of what happened were clouded with classification and the usual military tape, however, at the end of the day, the situation had been relatively bloodless. _Relatively. _As far as Shepard was concerned, bloodless was stretching the term, but she had a way of words, of understanding.

She spoke the word of God sometimes.

Nowadays she spoke from demons and devils and the crew had known it.

_"Do we tell them about Shepard?"_

_"Tell who? These guys? The Council?"_

Whispers as the metallic clacking of the two ships docking reverberated throughout.

"Real vulnerable right now, if we weren't anywhere safe." Joker remised, looking through the windows. The Normandy had been in Alliance space as of current, on the way to Altis on last orders from Shepard before Feros. Transmitted to her and plotted before the QRF action. "You know that there are people out there who still think space is some frontier, or something?" Joker gently tapped JD's side with his elbow.

Stars.

So many stars above the Normandy's windows.

"I had a roommate, back at the academy, wanted to pilot a lone ship if the Alliance didn't work out for him. Become some sort of space cowboy. But, you know, space has kinda been taken. It's all political lines now. No freedom to it. Speed limits here, tolls there. It's always around. Can't get away from it." Joker had seen JD staring up and out.

Perhaps it was by the grace of him being born on a moon, not a planet, that had given him this view of the stars, every day. He was born amongst stars and, chances were, he was going to die among them. Given the choice he'd rather look up than down; and the irony hadn't been lost on him as a soldier who had literally been dropped.

He looked up and saw stars.

"I wanted to travel more, as a kid." Pressly and Emerson had been awaiting by the airlock as well, close enough to hear JD speak. For Mai, JD, speaking like he did now, it was loud to her. In her mind's eye it was her focus as he seemed distant. "But, my parents, they said it was too dangerous. That home was where we needed to be until… until things were different."

Mai looked up at the stars, following JD's eyes. "You wanted to travel." She parroted.

What kind of person would any of them be without the Covenant? It was a question that passed her by more than she knew how to mentally process. It was that way because, at the end of the day, it meant that she would've been nothing but a vagrant, less than what she was now. And yet still JD had detested it.

She didn't understand.

The airlocks had interlinked and, after a slight humming, of pressuring, the two airlock doors had opened into one long corridor, on each side a Normandy. A mirror, the same save for its crew. Footsteps on metal, JD and Mai hadn't seen who walked across until the pleasantries were exchanged and words were spoken.

"I wish things could've gone better." A voice had said.

Pressly had sighed. "Me too."

"We'll have our people unload your passengers and casualties and be on our way. With that being said, we also have some reports to collect."

Mai and JD, they had almost forgotten. They had almost forgotten they were debriefed and questioned for their lives hours after they had arrived here. They stepped out of the cockpit approaching the airlock to confirm their suspicions:

Sunglasses and Cleft-Lip. Unmistakable. It was some time since their interrogators had chimed up. Clad in uniform and dress much like Shepard. So far removed Mai had finally put a name on why they had been so familiar. ONI had its counterpart in the Alliance Intelligence corps. Nothing as bad as testing on children, however she wasn't going to pry. It wasn't her field anymore.

A man with a cleft-lip, and a man with sunglasses. In the darker lighting of the Normandy they finally saw the hint of blue beneath his shades: cybernetics.

"Chief Gul, Chief Durante. How are you?" Sunglasses approached and Emerson and Pressly seemed taken aback by how open he had been to them. JD and Mai had been almost equally as uneasy.

Mai was silent, but stood at attention. JD had answered slowly. "We're fine… sir?"

Sunglasses had held his hands up, unoffended. "No need for the formality."

Cleft-Lip had played blocking for Sunglasses as Emerson and Pressly tried to interject, but instead he had flared his omni, a projection of identification coming up. "We're Alliance Intelligence. I'm Commander Lucy Cyma and my compatriot here is Commander Oscar Horne."

Horne had adjusted his dark sunglasses nodding at Mai and JD. "We're friends of Master Chief Gul and Master Chief Durante."

Emerson seemed shocked at this all. "The Ardennes is an Alliance Intelligence asset?" Emerson started slow, trying to piece this new information together.

"The Normandys are all stealth vessels." Horne had shrugged. "You do the math Marine."

* * *

It was immediately noticeable to the Spartan and the ODST that the Ardennes ran more in line with Alliance military standards than the Normandy. Or maybe it was just the fact that the two hadn't felt as welcome on the Ardennes than on the Normandy. The very absence of the Normandy, that unknowable aura, it was revealed to JD and Mai. They weren't comfortable, but it wasn't not comfortable on the Normandy.

Still it was familiar as Cyma and Horne led the two Chiefs into the Ardennes and its comm room, having called for them to follow.

Before they had entered however: JD tapped her knuckles.

Rock. Paper. Scissors. Shoot.

Paper did beat rock.

Mai had gone in first with a little disappointed smirk on her mouth, dried blood still on its corners.

"Authorization: Horne Alpha-Foxtrot-Six-Six."

"Command confirmed. You may proceed commander." The VI of the Ardennes had hummed inside of the comm room as Horne and Cyma turned around, the four of them standing.

Perhaps the reason why they were intelligence agents was the fact JD, usually perceptive, was unable to get a read on them. They were neutral. Neutral as ever. Same neutral as they had been questioning them first.

"If we had known," Horne started, taking off his sunglasses and letting the blue cybernetics in his eyes shine out. "That putting you on the Normandy would mean having you caught up in all of this, I'm not entirely sure whether or not we'd still put you on there."

"You still would've?" JD had asked outright, unable to drop his tenseness.

Cyma licked his lips habitually, the cleft in it passed over as he closed his eyes and nodded. "Special circumstances that overwrite even your circumstances. Respectfully, although, in a quieter universe, you two would've been the center of it. Hell, you could've ended up as the reason for war. But unfortunately, that's not the universe we're living in."

"And what universe are we living in?" A question that the two of them did ask at one point, spoken again by Mai as she held her arms behind her back and still stood at attention. Habit. Habit made from too many ONI Commanders.

"The one where Humanity's golden girl has, within her, the truth of the apocalypse and is the _only _one that can do anything about it."

Horne had sat on the comm console as Cyma sat in one of the chairs of the comm room. They were tired. So tired.

"I'm sorry…?" JD had felt compelled to apologize.

It was appreciated, albeit awkward as the two actual spooks seemed breathed out a breath.

Cyma held his hands out. "You two are important. We get that. You're two Human refugees from a universe where Humanity was about to be wiped out, and, on top of that, one of you is also a genetically modified super soldier." A palm went flat to Mai and she nodded. "We applaud you for taking this in stride so far. Honestly. Reports from the other section leads offer, mostly, benign notices about you."

_Mostly. _JD caught on the word, but Horne continued for Cyma as he held his head back.

"But the fact of the matter is we're also facing down this _Reaper _threat."

JD was honestly shocked. For all the tooth pulling from the Council these Alliance spooks understood? "The Alliance understands then?"

The Alliance did more than understand. The two nodded. "We want you to stick with Shepard." Horne interjected. "These are your new orders effective immediately."

The two of them had shuffled in their own way, JD anxiously crossing his arms as Mai stood even more rigid.

"The Alliance has always had a certain… outlook on Commander Shepard." Cyma continued. "Events before your time here has made the Admiralty… liable to trust Shepard, within due cause of course. Even if it means believing the Reaper threat. Captain Anderson echoes the same, of course."

"And you believe in her dreams?" JD asked, uncertain of what he was hearing.

"Well, from the reports we have extrapolated from Doctor Chakwas, they're not just dreams, are they?" The two intelligence agents looked at Mai.

"She knows. Somehow." Mai answered, head bowed for the briefest second. "It was on Eden Prime."

The two intelligence agents shared a look, "Anderson told us she suspects something of you two, but can't place what. And you don't want to be suspected by her of anything." Horne went on.

"So what do we do then?" Mai asked. Not out of fear or anxiety, but of the options she was supposed to have as a Spartan.

"Play it by ear, keep your security about you… But we need you to stay here. On the Normandy, you're still effective assets and Shepard needs people of your caliber around."

Again, JD had his ear about him. His fingers tapped against his arm in consideration. "Why is it important that Shepard not know?"

The two intelligence agents sucked in the spit in their mouths as they decided, silently, who would answer. "Wherever there is a threat to Humanity, to the innocent, _the innocent, _Shepard will go out there and quell it."

"Well, most good people would, right?" JD had asked a question and the agents turned over to the comm console, bringing up footage, bringing up the record.

"That's… Not what I mean." Horne explained. "Shepard without her empowerment by the Council was already dangerous to the system of things. There is just the pure determination and disregard for our preconceptions of the boundaries that we have in place."

"Is Shepard… a threat?" Mai asked, curious, trying to put her mind around something that seemed so outlandish to her.

"Yes, no, maybe I don't know." Horne went on before Cyma spoke after him.

"This world, this _galaxy,_ is built on the belief that everything we do affects one thing or another. It is with that care that the Turians don't invade Human space, the Krogan don't rise up again, and the Salarians keep covert with their intelligence operations. It's why there are some times we _know,_ but we cannot do. Hell! I'm pretty sure that Quarian, Miss nar Rayya, is stealing the readouts from the Normandy's stealth drive."

"And you're okay with that?" Mai's eyes widened and her blue eyes were sharp at that moment.

"We stole our side of the tech from the Salarians and the Turians copied it off an Asari prototype that was buried after we pressured them to cancel their own project in favor of territory rights. The Normandy project itself was kickstarted because of some wealthy military-industrial _benefactors_ heavily propositioned the Admiralty into their design_._ Will we do anything about it? No. Because the Quarian Migrant Fleets is currently within, its entirety, within Alliance space."

"Is it right?" Cyma posed. "No, it's not. But we can't do anything."

Horne had gestured to the wall, to the Normandy beyond it. "Now imagine we have someone, a special forces soldier, top of her class, given the fucking authority to do as she wishes, who will chase the injustices of this life without regard for what she will knock down in the process. This galaxy is built on beliefs and she will knock down those pillars because, at some point, all of our truths are rotten to the core. And the absolutely terrible thing about it as that _we still need her."_

Cyma followed up and there was belief in his eye. "She is the impulse for people that we have in our weakest moments; she is the thought of "I wish this person was dead" and, somehow, someway, it happens."" A force of God, striking lightning bolts.

"I am predisposed to the same purpose." Mai had declared. It wasn't loud, or brash, but a state of being.

Horne rose his finger at her. "You, Spartan Mai, are a _miracle_. You are what the UNSC needed, and you were built for that purpose. Shepard is a fluke. In what world does a sane organization let someone like her have power? In what causality does someone like Shepard get made?"

"I've seen Shepard fight." Mai continued. "She is supremely competent yes, but is there more to it? I don't understand?"

Horne took in a breath, remembering who had been in front of him. "Imagine, if you knew the Covenant homeworld, or whatever they have… High Charity, you could get there, you go through to them. You could end the war. But doing so would you mean you have to _break _something fundamental about the very ground you stand on. Shepard considers no cost in her actions in the grand scale of things, not because she doesn't know, but because she understands it doesn't matter to the people she is trying to save."

"Who did she kill?" JD had spoke up, all of the sudden. He was his father's son, after all. He had the blood of the investigatory in him. The two intelligence agents were surprised.

Cyma straightened his lips as Horne turned away. "Shepard, a few months before you all showed up, she led a rogue contingent of N7s out of Alliance space. She somehow tracked a bunch of Cerberus-affiliated scientists related to the Thresher Maw incident on Akuze and, she gunned them down, just outside of a colony. Thirty seconds, that was all it took for years of progress to be wiped away."

Cerberus. JD and Mai had done their reading. Their manifesto had been oddly familiar to them. It spoke to them in a way that had been familiar, and yet… They knew it was wrong. Humanity-affirming, Humanity-preserving, Cerberus, working from the shadows, heeded only by conspiracy theorist and aliens who had to blame Humanity for something, it had been in their briefing packets provided by Anderson originally before the Normandy. It was part of their reading in Buffalo, and, now, a part of Shepard's history.

"Alliance Intelligence was working general leads on Cerberus, well, one of those scientists was one of our plants; a double agent. They died that day… And, quite frankly, we couldn't hold Shepard to a court."

"Why?"

"Because we would have to tell her that the Alliance was complicit, at the barest edges, in what had transpired on Akuze. We couldn't risk Shepard's integrity for that. She's too important for Humanity's image. Hell, she would've come after us, somehow."

"If I told Shepard about the Covenant, then, she would try to take them all." Cyma held his hands together as Mai put two and two together. "She would hold them all to _justice._"

"Which is why your orders are to maintain your background and relation to them a secret."

"But she would." There was danger there in that room now, palpable danger. Mai, even without her armor, was still over six and a half feet of iron bone and muscle. It was a dare.

Horne's eyes glowed in their electric blue. "Spartan Mai, understand that there are politics to this now. Politics which we all have to abide by. There is no politics in war of course, where you two come from, but we are not at war."

"Then the Covenant would lead us there. We know it." Mai had spoken. "You know it."

"The Covenant? You don't think we understand that we have something as ravenous and culpable as the _fucking _Rachni within Human borders? We have never once doubted your disposition on the Covenant, but what we're dealing with here isn't the Covenant, not as you knew it. Same as how, probably, you two aren't the same people than when you first came here."

This life changed them, day by day. They were no longer just an ODST or a Spartan, tasked to do one thing for however long their lives went on. Their lives belonged not to a UNSC or a war, but to themselves, distinctly.

"We have to take them on their word. Do you understand? Or else we're acting on yours, and the end result to that is subjugation and war and the very truth of you… How do you think the war you fought was going to end? A peace treaty? Handshakes? An understanding that would forgive millions and millions of lives gone? No. We know what extinction wars are like. It ends with genocide. Your context, this war, is no longer a factor."

"But it still matters to me dammit!"

JD had never heard Mai snap like that before, her composure lost, the word of damnation on her lips as her fists clenched and her voice, her breath, was raw.

_Was she breathing a little more heavily?_

The two intelligence agents were awash with a feeling of intimidation, of feral and ingrain fear built into their DNA. Horne had gulped, but breathed out dryly. "You're the only one that thinks that, Spartan. They couldn't give less of a damn. You two are only a man and a woman. **You are not worth their time**."

For that, JD would be thankful, forever. That their crusade was not meant for him now, but Mai wasn't convinced, her entire form vibrating in rejection. Before she opened her mouth again in protest Horne had caught it:

"Go, pull your contract right now, go into the galaxy and kill everyone you think is a threat to Humanity. We'll see how much progress you make before Shepard has to hunt you down. Just like Saren."

Silence.

Complete silence.

Minutes, hours, days. The distance of four centuries, a war, an expansion of humankind in one context over another, it defined the two pairs there in that room.

Horne and Mai were poised to butt heads, but Cyma raised his hands up, licking his cleft lip, instead offering this as JD stood ready for something. Not anything he knew, but for a something he would have to do. Could he pull Mai off Horne? Probably not. Did he have to try? Yeah.

"What do you two want? In the end?" Cyma offered instead, and the spring in JD sprung.

The answer that came out of JD's mouth had come so fast, so naturally, it scared him. "I just want to live a normal life."

Mai's glaring down at Horne had been broken as she softened her own blue eyes, locking onto JD's by habit now. He spoke to her, it felt.

"And you, Chief Gul? What do you want out of your life?"

Minutes. Minutes passed as Mai thought and thought. This was never a choice she was supposed to make on her own. Her helmet could not protect her as her face was bared to the three men and it showed of a war in her mind, trying to dig up an answer that, eventually, left nothing but this:

"I do not know."

* * *

There were a few things in life, in his long, long, long life that Wrex had to be gentle about. Approaching Asari that had just barely gotten above their first hundred had been one of them. Then again Liara T'Soni had hardly seemed as spook as he thought she would be when he had approached her in the crew deck, sitting at the mess table with a blank expression on her face.

"Oh. Hello. Wrex, is it?" She looked up at him after taking in his form. Easily over four times her size and probably eight times her weight. She tried to keep cool but Wrex had known the sort. He wasn't really an easy someone to be in the presence of.

"Mm." He grunted, taking a seat at a seat that would actually be able to take him in in his armor.

"Can- can I help you?" Liara's notes as usual had been strewn on the table, but they hadn't been touched. She was deeper in her own head.

"Not really," Wrex rolled his head one side, getting rid of an annoying tautness in it. "I just want to ask you something."

"I, uh, okay." She was nervous, yes, but not because of him.

How long had it been since the first time he'd killed someone? It really didn't matter to him, for all the centuries he had put in between. She would learn one day, in all the centuries she had to live forward, he thought. "I know what it's like to meld. A matriarch, back in the day, me and her had some good times." Wrex was distant for a moment. Memories of her came rushing back. Memories she had, literally, given him. "I know how it can be used."

"Oh?"

Clashing, dreadfully, indistinct. Chakwas reappears out of Shepard's room and the sound of her struggle remerged and disappears with the door opening and closing. Pain. It was the sound of otherworldly pain.

Chakwas had patted a towel at her head as she passed by the two sitting at the mess, on the way to her office to grab more supplies, stopping for a brief second, she had uttered this: "She's awake."

Liara didn't know if it was a good thing as Chakwas was in and out in a flash, slugging drugs in her bag at back into Shepard's quarters.

"Are you okay, by the way? I heard you got your first kill planetside." Liara was surprised Wrex had considered. She was cautious in answering as Wrex, ever unreadable in his Krogan ways, looking at her with reptile eyes.

"I shouldn't be feeling anything," Her eyes drifting back to papers and reports that were just blending to gibberish in her post-battle haze. "It was something that had to be done."

Wrex had glanced to the data pads and the physical papers. Actual paper. "Death is a historical constant it looks. Great empires right down to us little things."

"I suppose it has gifted me a more personal understanding." Liara spoke. "If I may, can we change subjects?"

"Mm. I want to ask you something about melding, if you can."

Liara had blinked once or twice before remembering what he had opened up on. "Oh? How may I help?"

Wrex looked over his shoulders before sitting down next to her. The deck was bare, even from the guards. The entire Normandy had been occupied or stressed from Feros. "To what extent, in a meld, is what we see true?"

Liara looked at Wrex with a certain confusion. She was by no means an expert in melding, she had hardly done it in the last hundred years, and in no times recently, however there was something Wrex had been specifically looking for. "It is… expected, in a meld, that both people are willing to open themselves up. In a meld everything is on the table."

"What is everything?"

"Thoughts, memories, experiences, feelings-"

"How about dreams? Imagination?" Wrex posed to her.

"Mmm. No, not typically, if at all. Only the matriarchs are capable of such lucid melding."

"Hm. Right." As roughly as he arrived, he had left her alone at the mess table. For hours Shepard was heard, screaming, in pain, from her room as Chakwas had tried her best to stabilize her, and all Liara and the crew could do was listen as their commander went through Hell.

* * *

There is pain in her existence.

Her first conscious thoughts as she wakes up on wet sheets is that she is alive. Her second thought is that that is a mistake as she feels utter pain.

It's over her bones, in every breath she takes. She can feel, for the first time in her life, her blood run through her veins in a burning scrape against her insides. There is only one time in her life that she has felt this pain in any vague measure, and it's a part of her life she has hidden away. However, this pain, it has come from nowhere. Her existence in pain and yet there is more above that, like rocks dropping above into the magma.

In her more tangible moments, she sees Chakwas above her and her nurses. She knows their names: Willard, Marie, sometimes Doc Lamareux from Hitman is there. They look at her in worry and she doesn't doubt them. She must not look too hot as she tries to voice sound from her throat (_Hey, Marie, just like that time you dipped your arm in that coolant huh? She tries to say to the female nurse) _and instead a groan comes out.

They're pumping her full of drugs, hazing out her vision. What she sees out of her eyes is like a dream of a dream, and her ear drums are low and muted.

Then it happens: As if she was shot. It's against her shoulder as she feels four piercing pains as if something was stabbing her, and those invisible objects explode out from her skin. She screams as she thinks she hears crystals cracking.

And it happens again, in a different part of her body, and again, and again. Seven this time and they burn her as if she has felt a grenade go off in her chest.

She feels a different fire attach itself to her thigh, and, by instinct, even in her state, she tries to reach down as if wanting to rip something off. Her body reacts to stimuli, to pain in ways she had never known, and her mind goes through a checklist she can barely understand. There is no permanence for her in this state, her mind receding and then expanding, a headache not even beginning to describe it.

There is something that was once there, she knows, she desperately tries to understand. It's where her pain comes from, this feeling of _war_, but there is no memory to it.

She only thinks of herself, thinks of the crew that depended on her to get the fuck up and over whatever was happening to her.

She talked to Ashley recently, to see how she was fighting into the Normandy after the loss of her unit. She says every victory of hers on the Normandy is because of them, and she keeps fighting for them. Every Geth tincan in the ground means another unit like her old one survives. She is a Marine, Shepard knows. Like so many she had seen die on Torfan by her order.

Kaiden she wonders about in frank jest. He's polite for a Marine. Too understanding, to open; a nerd almost, but exactly the type of person the Galaxy needs. Still she knows that he doesn't command well on his own, especially with characters like Hitman, so used to violence of action and the action of violence. She's sixteen again, in India, when she thinks about Kaiden. A local boy, no older than how old she was when she started wandering Earth, wanted to travel with her. She only showed him his own way by the time they got to Argentina. Kaiden reminds her of him.

She's worried about Tali in that same breath. She is a young woman that has no right to be fighting the wars of her ancestors, creating hate against an enemy like that. Her Marines, the Normandy itself, is only an enabler of that. Next time they talk, and they_ will_, she wants to maybe lighten up: She wants to remind Tali to be young before the galaxy hardens her.

_"When Chief Durante- I mean, JD, when he puts on his armor, he reminds me of a Quarian. It's nice."_

_"Oh…?"_

_"Uh, I mean nothing by it, just an observation, yeah."_

She remembered in their last conversation it wandered to the crew, and then to JD and Mai. Shepard could always peg some inclination of blushable curiosity in someone's voice. She could see how Tali could be impressioned upon by JD: his very mystique and the way he carried himself around. He was a handsome man, reserved; soft in such a way. The smell of rain followed him in her mind.

As if gravity is passing through her like a wave, she goes rigid in another pained groan on her bed.

She thinks of Mai and, for a brief, blissful moment, there is confidence and understanding and clarity. She thinks about being a Spartan, and it allows her to grit her teeth just a little less as a war is fought and her body and soul is the battlefield.

All she can do is _run her thumbs over her knuckles_, count the seconds, and think about where it hurts. Not why.

* * *

This was what winning looked like, JD thought.

He'd never been there for the Insurrectionist operations. He'd never seen body bags of men and women spread like this except if it was because of the Covenant. Never because of another Human. This was just an inkling, an image, of what those years of Anti-Innie operations had looked like for the Spartans, and it was at his feet.

Twelve bags.

Twelve bodies.

One had been because of Liara, granted, but the rest had been from Mai. Almost all headshots. Mr. Blake had his lungs collapse from one of Mai's strikes, and another had their heart stop outright after a kick from her. That was the force of her mettle, and it felt so very very wrong.

He wouldn't lie to himself. He found pleasure in seeing Elites, in Grunts, in Hunters and Brutes being torn apart by explosives or gunfire. It was the very least cruelty that they deserve in turn for all they had done to Humanity. Though, he had to think. Of all that gore and violence put on the Covenant, the same had been done to these people, these Humans, by the Spartans.

"It was like… nothing I'd ever seen." A Hitman from Marine spoke it like a ghost story, just moving his arms in imitation of Mai, as if holding her DMR. "Blip, blap, bam."

The Ardennes had been handling the transfer of the bodies off and away, its crew in the Normandy well deck transferring the bags off.

Horne and Cyma had reaffirmed their directions to him and Mai. Nothing would change, but this was understood. They had to be on the Normandy, helping Shepard.

And yet, it was a miraculous thing. The two of them _wanted _to help Shepard, because it was Shepard.

There were little logistical things about him and Mai that the two agents went through further, pay and expectations, communications privately going forward, but, asides from the inherent weirdness and anomalies of what they were doing, everything was going fine with their involvement.

The two agents assured them the Covenant was being kept contained, and for their own sanity, they had to take them at their word.

The familiar tempo of a pair of footsteps was at his back as JD observed the body bags be turned out by the crew of the Ardennes. The rest of Hitman had either retired to stasis or were dozing in the bay themselves.

"Garrus."

"JD."

"You good man?" Garrus had asked of JD as he felt the knock of the back of his talons against his head gently. JD still frozen for a second. His habits were still there. He could count the amount of times he had felt the grip of an Elite on him, and was incredibly lucky that he had been able to count more than once.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine."

"Heard you got a crate over your head back there."

"Yeah. It's what the helmet is for though."

Garrus had tilted his head over at where their armor usually was: on their side of the bay by the Mako. Mai and Tali had been talking surprisingly.

The Turian gestured over his shoulder however to Hitman's lockers however. "Some of the colonists came at us with some personal affairs. Hitman has, uh, _claimed_ some items."

JD didn't know what to think of that, but he had stood by as some of his squads were guilty of the same. ODSTs like them were often the last in before a planet was glassed. So, who cared if some jewelry or trinkets were taken in pockets.

"Right." The numbness of his head where Garrus tapped him through his hair resounded for a moment, but went away.

"One of them was a guitar, and I mentioned to them, you played." _Right._ JD remembered he did mention to Garrus over dinner one day he did play, or, at least, practice a bit. "They're expecting a big show, or else I'm lined up."

"Wouldn't mind seeing you sing, now that I think about it." JD had said as another body bag was wheeled out to the elevator. The fact he had tried to quip went down sour.

Garrus chuckled briefly, putting a little more vibrato in his words at that moment. "The ladies like my voice around here, so they tell me."

"Who tells you?" JD scrunched his face. Even though almost half of the crew had been women he hadn't pegged any that would talk to Garrus about this.

Garrus backed up, realizing how much he bit off. "I mean, Tali says. We compare notes when we look over gear sometimes and I'm not really the type of guy to see a girl after the night so her input is valuable. I also hate recordings of my voice, they just never come out right and-"

"Hm." JD had cut off his rambling as the dead were carted away.

"You're not… this good, are you?" Garrus hadn't seen Mai do her job. He was, literally, knee deep in colonists with nothing but his baton. When he emerged out he had found Liara over a dead man and the colony destroyed. He wondered if JD would've done the same in Mai's position.

JD looked to Mai, hunched over her weapon at her workstation, ever working, ever quiet, ever a black hole in the room that hurt to look at. "Never." Was all JD could answer.

It was once said in ire, this: if ODSTs were any better, they'd be Spartans.

Mai's body jumped a little bit in her seat as she brought a hand to her mouth, muffling an episode of coughing. It was only because JD had been looking over at that very moment did he see blood in her palm.

He had wedged his elbow to tap Garrus's side. "Dinner later, right?"

He was surprised he had done that. Garrus hadn't been far off as he had just rewound what JD had just did. A good-natured wing in the side, gentle, if not masculine.

Old habit on JD's part; for those that he had truly called friend in the ODSTs. The fact that he had done that made his stomach swirl for a moment in cold and his face light up in heat.

_Dear God, I'm making friends again._ That worried him. Worried him to his bones.

"Oh yeah, sure." Garrus responded, and JD had nearly tripped as he made his way across the bay to Mai.

* * *

Mai knew she was many things; she also knew she was good at many things. To not admit that would be to betray her training and the thousands of hours of teaching that had been drilled into her by Ambrose, by Mendez, by Deep Winter. It was the grey areas of her, the areas of expertise she had yet to dabble in but was assumed to be hyper-competent in, that had bugged her. In one galaxy she might've been an expert at the manual of arms of many UNSC weaponry and their breakdowns.

This was not that galaxy.

This was a galaxy where a Quarian had been guiding a super soldier through the basic motions of Mass Effect weaponry. Favor for a favor.

Better to think about that than the Covenant and her orders.

_"You need __**my **_help?" _Tali had been as surprised as anyone could be, and Mai had simply nodded once. Unfortunately for Mai, she had asked the one person on the Normandy who could tell her unique body language. She was uncomfortable asking, unused to it, with the way her eyes almost looked away from her when asking._

Who was Tali to say no to a Human that very much looked like she could eat her whole?

Half an hour. That's all it took for Mai to get Tali's impromptu lesson on how she personally had taken to modding weapons down, for Mai had seen her do it a bit to her own, new, personal shotgun. She had seen her new kit get put together with the considerations of her experience on Feros: SMG on her hip and a shotgun on a _sling_. Curious.

"Again. I know it might seem paradoxical to have a computer put a limiter on a weapon. Though it's there for a reason. These things aren't like that-" Tali gestured to Shepard's classical wooden sniper rifle, hanging over the weapon lockers like a decoration. "Take it from a Quarian. If there were an easier way of doing things, we would've done it."

"I see." The two of them had stared at Mai's M-13 DMR, having been put together after its most intensive breakdown yet. It was somewhat relaxing, all things considered, and for all of Mai's disposition toward anything that hadn't been Human, Tali was tolerable. It distracted them from the Ardennes crew taking away the comatose and dead colonists.

"I'm in contact with my father, every time we near a beacon." Mai rose an eyebrow at her and she had immediately gotten defensive. "Oh no no no no it's okay I cleared it with Shepard and everything. It's just that, recently, he tells me the Geth that people are coming across are using ejectable thermal clips instead of the traditional method. So, who knows, maybe things will change… I'm not really big into guns and stuff, but it's interesting to learn that the Geth are learning like that."

Tali was a spy, she remembered from the two agents, stealing Human secrets. In another timeline, maybe, Mai would've taken her neck and broken it like Shiala for and punish her for it.

Though this wasn't where she would do it. The higher power of Alliance Intelligence had a pulse on it, apparently.

She was still just a kid. She had heard JD refer to her as that one day. It stuck. The way she chatted on and on, it did feel childish a bit.

As if she could personally define what that meant in relation to her.

"Is it… okay if I call you Mai, Chief Gul?" Tali asked all of the sudden.

Her hood had been up in its pretty colors, lavender and faded white. They were pretty, Mai had decided, kept up when she was on the Normandy. There was a word for it, specifically, in a language Mai had felt at the edges of her memory describing her hood. Something about _veil, barrier, separation. _She couldn't remember but it had connected with who she was, ethnically: She was an Arab. More than that though, another word came up. She was a gypsy.

The both of them.

"It is fine." Mai responded blankly. "Thank you."

"Oh no, it's the least I could do. Don't worry about it..." Tali dragged the last word out with consideration, poorly hidden, but Mai didn't expect anything less. She owed her. "Though, if you could help me out, I was wondering if you could give me pointers on strength training."

Mai looked at her up and down. She was thin, compared to even most Human women. The bodies of the Quarians were not meant for the martial culture and physicality of more planetside endeavors in centuries and it reflected.

Hitman and Wrex had been training her still, even JD and Garrus in more specialized, anecdotal items, and yet she had wanted more.

"Why?" Mai asked.

Tali had an answer quick. "The Geth. I have to be as strong as I can to fight them. Simple as that."

"You are doing okay, as you are now."

"I need to be better." Tali strained. "If I could just be more like you, out there, if I could bring that to my people, it might be enough for me to return home after this."

Mai had never regretted what she had gone through to become a Spartan. She had never had to think of subjecting that to other people.

"I'm… I, I'm not sure."

Tali stared at her for a few seconds, her expression unreadable to Mai.

"If you don't mind then, I'll ask JD." Tali was feeling a little more alien by the second, especially saying that. Mai had turned her head as if she had a helmet on, and Tali had been more than away that she wasn't supposed to catch her side-eye. She thought she could weather it, with her new found confidence in battle and kills beneath her belt now. She couldn't though: seeing those piercing blue eyes that read of electricity, drilling through her, seeing into her at her very core somehow. "I- uh- I mean, it's why I'm asking you first."

Mai rose an eyebrow subtly. "Why?"

Tali had shrugged, taking a moment to choose her words very carefully. "You two seem… spoken for each other."

Mai tilted her head. "I'm… not familiar with the term."

"Oh. Uh, is it the translator?"

"I'm not sure, but what do you mean?"

Tali had looked at her in a way that only a fellow "stuck in suit" person could. As in blankly, not hiding her face, and yet… There was a hesitation to it. "It's nothing." Tali finally let out, and that was that. Mai couldn't read any further as she considered moreso what she could do with Tali.

"I'll help you, let me just gather my thoughts about it. Is that acceptable?" That was the best she could do, the Spartan figured.

Mai, with her honed eyes, could see the shadow of a smile behind the cloud of her visor. "I'd like that. Thank you, Mai."

The Quarian left her staring at the table and her weapon, worn, the grip of it needed tape or else her hold on it would've crushed through it in due time. The simplicity of her blades, of the two knives off to the corner of the table overdue for a sharpening, had been the only weapons of hers that had survived for so long. From Spartan Lasers to MA5s, nothing survived her.

A breath she did not know she held in in front of Tali had come out the second she left, from the bottom of her throat a sharp hit of pain that rolled up her lungs and into her mouth. With no cloth in sight, feeling what was coming, she had simply palmed her mouth and let it come: The blood and mucus of inside of her, brought up by internal injuries.

The sight of her own blood.

As a Spartan, self-contained in her suits and armor, she never saw it often, if at all. Any blood that would leak would be contained by automatic medicinal foam and her suits own abilities. If she saw it at all, she was dead. That's what she had believed before today, and it made her stare at her own redness in her hand with a dread she hadn't felt since she was a little girl. For all the battles she had fought, for all that she had proven to herself, there was still something that could hurt her so easily. She could be killed. Just. Like. That. A flick of someone's hand. It was unacceptable, totally, completely to her, and yet, instead of disappointment and rage, there was only dread. Fear.

It had been a long time since she had feared.

Looking at her blood she saw her reflection in it, and all she could do was breath. And breath. And breath. And breath. She couldn't stop her body from breathing as she felt the pain in her rise up again but she couldn't help it as she felt it again, boil inside of her: of her very bones curling inward.

"Mai."

How many people could say that they had hurt a Spartan and lived? Not Shiala, but her pain continued onward in her memory. Saved. She had to remember what it felt like to fight against it later. Replaying again and again what it felt like to be hurt from the inside with such a force that she couldn't even see or fight against.

"Mai?"

What if the Covenant got their hands on Eezo? What if they had found some way to convince Biotics to fight for them? What if the Covenant was still trying to end Humanity and she had feigned herself to believed that maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't be an enemy anymore.

"Mai!" Jonathan-Jameson Durante. JD. ODST. Private First Class once. Now Master Chief Petty Officer. It was him, and Mai wasn't thinking about her mistakes, her injuries. JD had been where Tali had just been with a rag in his hand and a concerned look on his face. "You alright there, _Spartan?"_

He called her Spartan. He knew what it meant: strength.

She needed it.

"Uh, yeah, yeah." It was unconvincing, both at its content, then its presentation as Mai again started coughing up, seizing the rag from JD's hand and putting it at her mouth. He had never seen her face in pain before, and so he had learned she took all pain with open eyes. It was as she was trained, but even then, there was a painful squint to them that gave her momentary crow's feet.

All that pressure on her lungs had been so great, so hot that it threatened to burn her up.

Then a counter-point however. The feel of a hand across the center of her back, above her lungs, just the lightest of pressure. It didn't push her lungs further; it was just there. She concentrated on it as she breathed in and out into the now wet rag.

She knew it was JD's hand.

A minute that had felt of a year had passed and Mai's coughing had turned itself down until there had been none. Expectantly, she knew that JD was looking at her with that face of concern he always wore when he asked her about her.

"You need to go to medbay." It was an order. He wanted it to be an order.

She shook her head. "It's too full now. I'll live its just bruising of my ribs and lungs."

"So I heard, but you need medical attention."

"I can _handl- hck!"_

Trying to put any force into her words had made her cough again, and the once grey rag had turned dark red where she put it.

**"Chief Gul." **It left JD to put force into his voice, and for a moment, her indoctrination betrayed her. She wanted to take those orders.

"JD I'm fine. I'll go when it clears up. That's final."

He had heard in the hour since Feros what had happened to her: How an Asari reached into her and tried to crush her lungs with her ribs. How in the moments after she had asked Wrex to simply do that in reverse. It was a rush job, but it was enough to relieve the pressure. Rib subluxation, JD had pegged. Simply her ribs were out of place and might've needed some heavy adjustment by the grace of the Medbay. The Medbay was full though: with Hitmen. Chakwas had even then still been occupied with Shepard. Mai had a point, but JD couldn't let her just sit there in pain.

He was, technically, a combat medic. Training to be, of course, but still one by his regard.

Mai looked at him with her defiant eyes, the ones he recognized. He didn't know if she was just stubborn or really believed in her invulnerability as a Spartan. Though in the end it circled around to a question he had asked so many times: Was she Human?

He pushed a breath through his nose before he got himself worked up, finding his center, remembering his past:

"My Mother had panic attacks, and when she had them there were breathing exercises I worked her through. I think they could help. Please. If anything, would you just try this for now?"

Mai remained silent, but it didn't stick as she felt the fire in her breath form again, beckoning her to cough. She trusted him here. "Fine."

He gestured with his hand to behind the Mako, he pulling up a crate next to her cot, putting him level as he could with her as he sat on it, cross-legged.

"Criss-cross-applesauce." Mai had let slip from her mouth, and JD, after a moment of confusion, remembered. He nodded in recognition and there was only a little amusement Mai had gotten from it as she sat herself, opposite of JD.

Eye to eye. It was very rare that they had been like this. There was a question on his mind at that moment, staring into Mai's eyes, however as he opened his mouth, he saw Mai's grit, the way she tried to keep her breathing not painful.

"My left eye, focus on it." He said once.

"Yes." She responded, doing so.

Hazel eyes. Old, and yet young. Younger than hers, and yet not at the same time. He was getting scruffy, she noticed. She wondered when she learned that word: scruffy.

"Center your breathing. Match mine." His hands moved along his own chest, as if animating the breath inside of him as he inhaled, exhaled. It was slow, distinct, but not forced.

"Mm." A little grunt, a little hit of pain as she did match JD's. He noticed immediately, and a pinprick in his mind wanted to help. He had to stay calm for it to work.

He had started his breaths large, listening for her to match and the strain he had heard, stepping them down and the air he brought in slowly. With each cycle, her breaths had gotten less and less ragged. He was trying to find her max capacity at the moment.

"Match your inhales to exhales. Stay within what doesn't hurt for now." Long minutes went by, the images in their eyes frozen: each other. They shared the pace of breath. "Relax."

Mai's shoulder, stiff as they had been, had drooped, but she felt guilty. "I'm sorry I didn't catch that attacker beforehand. I was unprepared."

Another cycle before JD responded. "Don't worry about it. Who could've known?"

"**Jon.**" There was worry in her voice and JD almost tripped over his breath as she said his name. "It wasn't right."

She called him that planetside, and a worried look came over his face even she saw.

She tilted her head, a questioned asked.

JD had gulped in a breath. "Ah, oh, it's nothing. It's just that not hearing you say JD is, weird… and the last person to call me Jon like that was Dawn."

"What do you mean?"

JD pursed his lips as they went through another breathing cycle. "Dawn was, is-" He didn't know what words to pick. "We were very close. I was comfortable with her calling me Jon."

"Am I not allowed?"

"No, no." JD had immediately sprung up. "It's just… It's me, not you."

JD for now then, Mai decided. Why she had felt compelled to say it in the first place was beyond her, just in the moment of it. Here, now, it was more deliberate of her. Trying it on her tongue and this had been the result.

Again, Mai tilted her head at JD as she asked a question. "Did you call Dawn something besides Dawn?"

"Sunshine." And he had said it with all the slick and familiarity that could be found in the comfort of intimacy.

They kept on breathing, stepping down, and down, and Mai had to admit that she had felt very comfortable like this.

"Is this okay? Your breathing."

She nodded in her medium. Things were okay. "It's better. Thank you."

Looking at Mai for almost fifteen minutes straight had relaxing in itself, not that JD would admit that. To see her calm instead of bothered or aggravated, it was nice.

"Your Mother, what was her name?" Mai asked aloud as JD listened to her breathing still, just in case.

JD, distantly, remembered his childhood. It was a quiet childhood, all things considered: At home, his Dad would use sign language as well, so as to not exclude Mom. He learned English rather later compared to his peers, and so he had been quiet because of it. One of his childhood friends asked him if he ever blamed his Mom for how he was.

_JD shook his head, sitting on the cusp of a ramp at the skate park._

He was going to open his mouth to answer, but held back.

Instead his right hand had touched upon his chest before it had gone flat in front of him, thumb coming up to his chin as the hand was vertical. His two hands came together with his index and middle fingers together with a tap. After a beat he had finger spelled. Six letters.

MY MOTHER NAME C – A – R – O – L – E

Mai nodded, understanding, but was approached with another flat palm that pulsed twice at her, he raising an eyebrow.

Mai could only use her words. "I don't remember."

JD dropped his hands as he had seen the reflectiveness on her. It was a look he had seen on her before, back on Earth and Arcturus: going through the stories of their lives so as to keep their story straight to the intelligence people. It was the before of her that made her like this.

Her thumb ran against the back of her knuckles, JD noticed.

His hand had raised again, and Mai had looked with her usual snappiness to see if he would sign.

He didn't however, reaching halfway up, but not going any further as he reigned it in. A closed fist.

"Hm?" She mumbled.

"Nothing. Nothing." He remembered the crate that he was sitting on as he looked down. "Oh yeah!" He reached down to pick it up, opening its plastic lids. "Here."

Presented to her it had been immediately apparent what it was.

Her own body temperature had been well regulated due to the techsuit usually, and she was offered a thin thermal blanket just for regulation in her accommodations. The cot she had called her resting place these last few weeks had hardly seen much in the way of creature comforts, not that she needed it.

JD saw differently.

"What is this?" She still asked.

"Shepard offered. I thought, you know, it'd be nice."

It was a grey blanket, wrapped up in a plastic bag. Extra-large according to the labelling, weighted, and lush. "I don't need this?"

JD pursed his lips. "Well, we don't really _need _much of anything, but I thought you'd like this." Licking the inside of his teeth, arms outstretched, as if at a kid's birthday party, there was something awkward to it. "As someone who sleeps a lot, I recommend this type of stuff… Can you feel with your techsuit?"

Mai shook her head once, still looking at the sheets. "Not to the sensitivity of skin."

JD rolled his head from side to side. "You spend a good part of your life asleep, Mai, it helps to dedicate something to it. I don't think you'll be in that thing forever, right?" Gradually, Mai reached out, taking the package from him as she carefully unzipped the affair, exposing the folded sheets to open air. To her. JD was right, there was a deceptive weight to it. "Even if you do end up on a ship, serving, I hope they give you your own quarters. Something better than this." He motioned to the cot in the dark, amidst lockers and gear.

"You think this is better?" Mai had asked, not out of malice, but of not knowing.

"It's a small step." He shrugged. "If you don't want it I can-"

"That is," she paused, trying to verbalize what felt off about this, "not necessary." Mai had croaked out slowly, unsure. There was only one part of her that had not been covered by her techsuit. Bringing the entire thing up to her face, she had rubbed one cheek against it to JD's surprise, holding it against her. "Soft." She whispered.

Against her cheek it had felt of, almost, warm snow, of lush grass and a pliability that she had not ever known. The gall and the exuberance to think that people existed in these at night.

"I don't think this is right for me." She said astutely, pulling away, keeping her breathing still. "I may not be used to it."

JD could only nod a few times. He tried. She was a creature of habit. Her habits kept her alive and he supposed sleeping had been set in stone for her.

"The Ardennes is still docked; I can turn it over."

There was reluctance to it however as JD reached to it again, Mai holding it against herself. This was a thought that flashed by her mind: "Is this a gift JD?"

"I- uh. I-" Mai tilted her head at him as he tried to find an answer. She deserved the simplest one really, even if he really didn't intend for this package to be interpreted as such. "Yeah. Sure." He looked off away, to the well deck door of the Normandy, to the sniper rifle above the lockers, to distant stars and memories to avoid Mai's gaze. "You don't get much to be comfortable down here and I just thought…" He drifted.

"I see."

There was a blankness in her mind, running through premade plans and impositions about what to do. Everything in her life she had been trained to process what had happened to her by reflex and action. Before that, before she was a Spartan, the world was not kind enough to her to even entertain this: She had never gotten a gift before. Not like this. Her Spartanhood was a gift, she knew, but this in her hands, bundled up and ready to be used in its non-military packaging and design, meant for a more civil world, this was a gift in a more traditional sense.

Of all the things that did feel right to her however, it had been who had given her it. Her contention was not of him; not in any real sense. Once, what felt like years ago, they had been trapped in a cell, she had had her very skin ripped off of her, and he had offered his pants for her. It made sense to her that he had been a giver in some way. Further beyond that, when she was a child, she was given the gift of life.

She had a mother once who tried to gift her more.

Mai was unreadable to JD as she just looked down at the bundle. A stray, black bang fell from her face. Her hair had been getting long, more and more tied into a longer pony tail that was so different than how it first was when he saw her in the flesh.

"I will… hold onto it?" She offered.

JD's eyes widened and the next breath into his nose had been electric. "Hm? Oh yeah, sure. Try it out." He held his hands at his stomach, unsure of what to do with them. "If not maybe I can get you another… gift? Yeah, gift."

There was a hint of annoyance in Mai's eyes as JD explained. He sounded a little like Garrus now, with how much they talked. Though it was okay. It would have to be okay to her.

"You do not need to gift me anything, JD. It's not necessary."

The corner of JD's mouth had gone into a quick frown. "Again, Mai, it's the little things that people deserve. We're only Human."

_Only Human. _She passed by the thought.

What was it to be Human?

"Thank you." She blurt out less than gracefully, realizing that he, at the very least, deserved it.

JD by habit had cupped his hand at his chest as if grabbing something from the air, bringing it in. He hadn't even realized he did it.

YOU'RE WELCOME

"It's nothing." He shrugged.

Mai thought otherwise, shifting the package up as if he hadn't seen it. "It's a gift."

They both breathed easy after that, the Ardennes recovering the colonists from Zhu's Hope and the Normandy underway to Altis. It would be a few days before they would get there, a few days before another reckoning with the present Covenant, however the two chiefs bided their time. It was no use fighting it, not for them. There would always be the Covenant. They just needed to live with it now. So in the following nights in the quiet burndown from Feros, the Normandy's Marines had recovered, giving a wide berth from Mai as business resumed, to anyone's perception, normally.

* * *

It was night time on the Normandy when Shepard was deemed _okay_ in her own thoughts, tentatively. Okay in the sense that her body didn't mind it when she swung her legs from the side of her soaked bed after her eyes darted open and saw her ceiling. A nurse had been assigned to watch over her during the nights, but the one on shift now had been tuckered out.

With all her stealth training she had, realizing that she had been down to her skinnies, soaked, changed out into a new set and into proper clothes. She dreaded to know how much time had been lost, and how much shit she was going to get from Chakwas about being up and about, but she was still a CO of a ship. Flashing her omni she read the Normandy's telemetry and a backlog of reports and summaries from Kaiden for each shift and hour.

Three days, she realized, throwing up her omni to check. It'd been three days since Feros and now had been the first time she was lucid. She felt it: a pierce of her brain, of her memory, it compartmentalized all that pain. She would deal with it when she would, just not now.

There were cameras throughout the Normandy, all feeding back into Shepard's omni, however she had hardly used it since she boarded. It wasn't right to her, and she could just check on anyone in person if the need was warranted. Tonight, might've been one of those nights, the Normandy deemed and its crew in half for the sake of a sleeping schedule. She wouldn't dare do her rounds without being briefed by Chakwas.

On the bridge, Pressly had been up plotting a course to Altis smoothly enough, Joker letting some of the autopilot take over as he simply slept in his chair up there, a blanket cast over him with some sports mascot on it.

_Speaking of blankets_.

There had been a camera that caught Mai behind the Mako and her accommodations. Pitiful as they were, she had never complained about it. Hopefully, Shepard thought, Altis would provide her a stasis pod for her. Though it didn't seem needed at that moment with her. She hadn't a pillow and her sheets had been emergency issue from a survival kit, which was why it had been understandable that JD had asked via her for blankets. Shepard had a million thoughts about the two chiefs, one of them being that JD had been Mai's handler.

Whatever the case was the result was the same:

She hadn't used her newly acquired blanket as a blanket, interestingly enough. Mai slept like the dead: a straight body on a cot that had been going above and beyond its call of duty. With the blanket however, it had changed. She had turned her blanket into a pillow or cushion of sorts, balled up, her head half turned on it as she seemed inclined in her sleep to lean into it, nuzzling it.

She was a monster on the battlefield, taking her fists to a plant monstrosity and winning, and yet even she was susceptible to something as simple as a blanket.

Interestingly enough JD hadn't been at the wall besides her as he had occasionally done. Taking a glance at the feed of the stasis pods he had been in one, nestled between Kaidan and Ashley's.

Grabbing a water bottle by her bedside, she beat back the cotton in her mouth, sliding on one of her more comfortable affairs: Apparently someone in the Alliance brass saw it pertinent that all N7s have access to apparel denoting their deeds. She wouldn't say no to an N7 hoodie, especially not tonight as, after knowingly giving her would be caretaker a glance, quietly shifted out of her quarters.

One of the few Marine guards on duty had been shocked to see her.

"Ma'am-!" He saluted but she had stopped that, holding a finger to her lips.

"If Doctor Chakwas comes looking, I'll be in comms."

The Hitman had seen Shepard give her warm smile, seemingly unbothered by what had just been thrust upon her, and he sputtered, nodding, letting Shepard walk up the stairs to the command deck.

Pressly had been at the helm. He belonged there, Shepard thought. Not her. Still with a literal galaxy before him he hadn't noticed her slink past another few Marine guards into the comms room.

There was a comm buoy nearby, close enough for her to ghost her hands over the controls and consider, for a moment, what she was doing.

There was a great many needs pressed upon her, people she needed to talk to, people who depended on her, and yet of all the people that she had rung up in the minutes after she had been up from the pain, her mind, her heart compelled her to do this desperately:

"Computer. Give me a real-time connection to the dreadnaught Kilimanjaro. I want to speak to _my mother_; XO Shepard."

It was a quick connection. The Kilimanjaro was Hackett's flagship, and it had been forward of them, over Altis, holding positions with a portion of the Fifth Fleet as security of Alliance interests over Altis.

The connection went live and Shepard had held the railing of the comms center tightly. This was so unlike her, she knew.

Such connections often didn't include visual, but that's not what Shepard needed or expected.

Groggily, as it was the night for most Alliance timetables, Shepard had heard a voice of home.

"Shepard speaking-" Shepard had imagined it with how she sounded, she was in bed and turned on the console on her table bedside. She knew the room on the Kilimanjaro, pictures had been exchanged when she had set up the pictures and mail from admirers in her own quarters. It took a moment for Captain Hannah Shepard to realize who had been calling. "Oh! Hi- Commander, I'm on duty."

Shepard smiled, rolling her eyes. She needed the sleep as much as any. Being XO of Admiral Hackett's ship would demand much of her, though Shepard wouldn't be long.

"Hey Mom…" She sounded like a kid again, coming up to Mom after a bad day. A younger woman, a kid, a child, that she once was. Her mother knew it.

"Sweetheart?" All pre-tense of the ranks they held were dropped and concern was in it. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing." It was a lie, but right now, talking to Mom, it was okay. "I just, I just needed to hear your voice." And she had. Shepard considered hanging up just then but that would've only garnered a concerned return call.

"Oh sweetie." Hannah had breathed softly. "Did something happen?"

"I can't answer that." Shepard spoke frankly, but tiredly, what rejuvenation she felt from being able to get up from bed and walk fading. "You know, Spectre business. It's why I didn't call after I was inducted."

"I'm your mother, Janie. You can tell me a whole lot otherwise. You know this. We'll always be there for you."

Shepard felt tears swell in her eyes for a flash, but dragged them away. "I don't know why but, _I just needed to know_ you were okay."

A long silence dragged, but it wasn't cold or hard. It was just understanding. "I am very much okay, right now, Jane Kennedy Shepard. I hope you are too."

She needed that. More than she knew or had ever felt before. She also needed this before she got too emotional:

A masculine, familiar voice. "And what about me Jay-Kay?"

She laughed, trying to stifle it as if to hide herself from the crew beyond the door. It wasn't needed. "Hey Dad."

John Shepard. The other Commander Shepard. Leader of the Kilimanjaro's Marine regiment.

Being a Marine, being in the service, it was in her blood all the way back to a proud British naval tradition during the colonial period. She thought she was going to break it, being the last of the line of Shepard. Instead she had become its jewel.

"I don't have to worry about you, Pops."

"Oh that hurt, Jay-Kay."

"Doubt it. Nothing can get to you."

He heard the sheets of their shared bed shift, probably, by Shepard's thought, coming to the side of the bed and facing the comm console on their quarters in the Kilimanjaro, a picture of her set up on bedside. It was the same picture she had on her coffee mug.

"Pretty risky call to be making kiddo." John Shepard remarked despite it all. "Are you okay?"

"Oh, shush honey. Our kid just needs her parents." Hannah chided

"And the Kilimanjaro needs their officers in tip top shape." John Shepard yawned a bit. "I love you kiddo, but there's so many things about you being a Spectre, what's going on over Altis, and what you're caught up with that I don't think this call is in our best interest. I mean this in the kindest way I can put it. Your Mom just got into a yelling match with a few Quarians earlier and it's only gonna continue tomorrow."

Hannah gaffed behind the call but she couldn't disagree.

"I know Pops, I know. I'll let you get back to sleep but… Things could be so much worse." Shepard hadn't even know why she had said that, her eyes widening, but yet it had been the most sane she ever felt like she said.

"Course'" John Shepard agreed. "But you're not gonna let that happen, right?"

"Of course." Shepard said quietly, brushing her hair, missing the bun that she usually kept it in. "I don't know if we can, but uh, let's get lunch on Altis? I'll be there soon. You know that, right?"

Hannah returned. "We were notified from Alliance Intellignece, yes. I think a Spectre like you can find a way to make it happen… We'd like that, sweetheart."

"Okay. We will. I'll let you get back to sleep. I'm sorry I called. I really am."

"Don't worry about it, sweetheart. I think you're allowed a little call, here and there."

"Knock them dead out there. We're all real proud of you kiddo."

Shepard smiled at herself, at everything. This little family they had; it was broken once. Scattered amongst the stars and Earth itself. Now it was mended and good and, in some small part, the way she treated her own crew came from how she treated her blood family.

_"I should go."_

_"We should go."_

All three of them had said at the same time, only for a bumble of laughter to follow through as the call ended.

Confiding in herself the knowledge that her mother was okay, it settled a turmoil in Shepard she hadn't even known before. An itch beneath the skin, perhaps always there. It was no matter.

Business now:

"Computer. Put me through to the Council on my Spectre credentials."

Instead of the three Councilors however she got a surprise when the holographics came up, staring eye to eye with her:

"Nihlus? How are you…" Shepard tried to find the words to explain the impossibility before her. "Whole?"

He was as he was when she first saw him on the Normandy. With her proximity to Garrus nowadays it had made the stark contrast of what figure Nihlus cut so much more present. He was taller than Garrus, his skin darker and his white face point more defined, more war like. A predator in his prime, looking at her with the beady eyes of a raptor. It might've intimidated her, but there was something more pressing that trumped all of that: The last time she had seen him he was broken and burned. He was barely a body.

The Turian gave her only a grim smile as he nodded a few times to himself. "I've been reading your reports to the Council. You're very upfront about your findings, aren't you?"

Shepard's dry mouth returned to her as she put together a response. "I'm very good at report writing, I like to think."

"Your reports are, at minimum, 10,000 words Shepard." Nihlus had snarked.

"Hey, I try to keep the max only about," God she really was terrible to anyone who reads about what she had done, "around 30k… Anyway, Nihlus, what's going on? Why'd you pick up?"

_How fast was treatment, Jesus Christ!_

Nihlus had nodded a few times, crossing his arms. "Nothing pressing, asides from your current assignment. I just wanted to reach out before you reported today. Are you adjusting to _this _work well?"

There was a glimmer of emotion on the Turian's face, Shepard tried to read. "Chasing Saren has been exhausting, admittedly, but we're turning up more leads, every hour." A thought. Nihlus looked prim and proper. "Will you join us in the hunt, Nihlus? We need you, with what you know of Saren."

Nihlus brought his arms behind his back and straightened his chest. "Rest assured, Shepard I am providing as much assistance as I can from the Citadel. I will let you proceed with your report to the Council, however, when you are able, return to the Citadel for your first in-person debrief with me. There are a few things that even Spectres won't discuss over secure lines."

"Heh. I suppose. Looking forward to it." Shepard had made a friendly salute, but she paused, looking at Nihlus. Looking at him and the fact he seemed very much okay. "I'm glad you're okay, Spectre."

Nihlus stared back at her, and he cut the call.

Shepard blinked at the cut off. Had she done something wrong?

No, she figured. She left people like that all the time. Not on purpose of course.

Without further ado Shepard had rung up the Council as if they were old friends, and, quickly, the oral report she had given had been instilling some part as to why she was becoming their new favorite Spectre.

* * *

So many cities they had burned. So many cities they had gone into to slaughter Humans. So many millions, so many worlds destroyed. All for the purpose of carrying out the Will of the Prophets, and to commence the Great Journey. In another world, in another universe, the day they would've stood there on Earth, in the African state of Kenya, it would've been in a victorious war. It was a victory that only Usze would've been alive for, if history went a certain way.

This was not that world. It would never be.

Away from the city of Mombasa, away from the African coastline and the temporarily docked Ardent Prayer, the Covenant stood on Humanity's birthplace.

Golden plains. It was a Human savannah which Usze had never seen before, so at peace.

_Not on fire._

"Two million years ago modern Humans emerged from this land and started to move throughout this world." He was the ambassador for an Earthen national community on that continent, representing his people on the Human political stage. It was his honor to introduce, in some ways, Humanity as a whole. "Here, where we stand, Humanity has seen fit to preserve it as best we can, as it once was."

Even a cursory glance, the very typical recon and intelligence work that the Ardent Prayer could do from orbit, it didn't mean much to the Covenant.

These cities had been like those on the usual colonies of the UNSC, and this was on Earth's capital. It was still an oddity that they had been, all things considered, nearly 400 years prior to their own time scale.

Usze had been on Karonee's side as she listened to the ambassador speak of birthplace and origin. A procession of Covenant representatives from all their races walking in step with the dark Human male as he extended his arms to the horizon.

Karonee wondered, sniffing the air, thinking of her ancestors. "Are you," she shifted her cape, speaking to the Human ambassador. "The same Humans as you were when these plains were, back then?"

The ambassador adjusted his glasses as he considered the question.

A Jackal chittered as his feral instincts felt danger in the long grass. The Drones had chittered at the air as if calling for distant cousins.

"Humans, are an adaptable species." He explained, looking to the golden horizon. "We are not, say, the Humans that once walked these plains with nothing but the hunt in our hearts and no concept of the stars beyond. But we are very much like them."

"Are you?" Karonee rattled.

"We have, by virtue of having gone to the stars, together, in speaking to you like this, a better type of Human. We are, hopefully, holding within us, less of their faults and more of their strengths. This is by necessity, by the passage of the many generations that now go beyond Earth. Though we have not forgotten where we have come from."

Karonee and Usze, and the Covenant themselves, stood on Earth. Not as conquerors or crusaders, but as guests.

The Ambassador slouched down, squatting on the dirt, motioning for Karonee to do the same. She did, eye to eye, almost knee to knee with the man as they stood on unbroken nature, only the parked shuttles and the standing guards reminding them civilization was somewhere.

"You, a Sangheili, lost of their Homeworld, I cannot begin to know what it would be like to lose it. However, I ask you, whatever you may do going forward in this galaxy, remember that no matter who we are or where we come from, we come from this dirt." The Ambassador reached down to earthen brown dirt and dug his fingers in. Karonee could only notice that his skin had been the same color, and that, maybe, he had meant it literally. She, among many of them there, knew what it had been like to see Humans turn to dust. With a grabbing of dirt, some falling through his fingers, the Ambassador motioned for Karonee to open up her hand flat and up.

Usze had disagreed with the notion, he turning away from her, but she had obliged the Ambassador as she felt the sieved dirt crumbling onto her bare hand.

"Everything on this planet, everywhere there is Humanity, know that we come from this."

Usze had wanted to laugh. Of course, Humans came from something as pitiful as dirt. Karonee had thought differently however. The dirt came into her hand entirely and she felt it seep into her hand's scales, turning it over it, save for a few clumpy portions, returned to the Earth.

"You have come far." She nodded at the Ambassador.

A heretical thought, derived from his smile, crossed by Karonee's mind. How could a Godless race such as the Humans make it as far as they did without the Covenant? She thought of the Humanity she had been in war with, and this Humanity here. Humanity always stood alone it seemed; weak, as they were predisposed to with naturally against the broader races and powers, but they stood still.

In this galaxy, the Sangheili, or, at least, the genetic ancestors of the Sangheili, foretold by ancient Quarian archives, were nothing more than animals.

Usze, off in the distance by his trained eye, saw the shimmer of a four-legged beast. He raised his carbine, peering through its scope. A great fur coat had engulfed its neck as fangs were seen bared, animal eyes somewhat looking at him at what felt like hundreds of yards away before disappearing away.

"A lion. They are natural predators." The Ambassador had noticed Usze looking away and out as he stood again, wiping his hands with a handkerchief. "Very dangerous to us. It's a miracle that Humanity was lucky enough to have not been stamped out by them."

Lucky? Undeserving then, the Humans were. Sangheili were, from the very first second, able to fight for their lives and kill. "Could a Human take on a lion in fair combat? With nothing but what they were born with?" Usze asked harshly.

The Ambassador had wondered, looking out, knowing of the pride that remained there in that reserve. "Can you?" He posed.

The exchange had remained in Usze's head for his remaining time on Earth, the Alliance organizing for the crew of the Ardent Prayer to tour their homeworld. The thought was only compounded with this then, touring a nation-state in what the Humans called the continent of Asia. The founding documents of a place called Vietnam read this:

_All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free… And thus the entire Vietnamese people _ _are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty._

Amongst a beautiful lily garden in that country, the Covenant representatives had been given rest, listening to the silence of water and lilies.

There was no peace in Usze. "When the Humans burned," he spoke, almost to no one but his reflection as Karonee held a pink petal in her hand. The city they were in, it was called the city of ghosts. "Did they understand why they died?"

The worlds Karonee glassed, they never provided that answer.

"They knew they lost. And yet they would still fight us," The Covenant were the lions once. "For their survival?"

For what was liberty and independence without life?

Karonee considered. "What do we die for, Usze Tahamee?" She posed the question back, pink petals in her hand from a tree whose branches came close to their patio. The Brutes were otherwise being treated to a local meal and the Elites of the group had no patience to deal with their barbarity in eating. Vietnam, Asia, it felt familiar to the Elites, especially in gardens such as this. So a great deal loitered amongst the quiet places in the city of ghosts, echoing ancient history and a somber, misty attitude that they never got to see in the war on Human planets.

"For the Great Journey."

Karonee tipped her head up at Usze's answer.

"It is a higher calling, no? Perhaps Human values are believed to be as much worth dying for as our own callings."

"Greater than our Great Journey?" Usze asked of Karonee. She sighed, letting the petals drop to the water.

"As Humans lack the Great Journey, perhaps we Elites lack…" She quieted herself, looking across the gardens and seeing the San'Shyuum Prelate standing like a statue, amongst statues.

What would her life, and indeed all Elite lives be, without the Covenant? Without the Prophets?

"No," She revised her words, turning to her spec ops commander. "There is nothing greater than the Great Journey."

Though, she admitted to herself, she was not remised to the detour they were on now.

It was nice to come to a Human world and not fight. Her guilt was written in her wist for her own Homeworld. Soon enough however, soon enough, she knew, she would return to it.

"So, this is what it's like to not be haunted by Demons…"


	26. 1-20: Imbued by their Creators

* * *

**1-20**

**Imbued by their Creators**

* * *

"_We're not going to be your toys any longer!_

_"She's right! We're sick of your training."_

_"We're leaving! And you can't stop us!"_

The only easy day was yesterday. That's what Cameron Masterson thought as he was jostled awake and told to get his duty handgun. Insurrectionists on **Reach**?!

No, Chief Mendez had clarified. Not an insurrection that he would know of, anyway.

The trainees were rebelling, a certain group of them however. 023 was the ringleader. She was a bright girl from Sargasso, eight years removed. She was fourteen now. _All _of them were fourteen.

Too bright, almost. "Cut them off at the exit! And don't kill any of them!" Mendez had yelled in his ears as Marines and security personnel were deployed to every exit. It wasn't enough however. They had just gone through their augmentations. Still Masterson wasn't one to argue against Mendez. He had done his fair share since he had been attached to the program.

It was a blur of beat downs and breaking: security apparatuses being broken and distractions being set. Half the damn facility was out of power and the other half about to be set on fire as, all at once, one trap had worked.

"They'll be here." Halsey spoke, planting herself in that hallway, the light of the exit to their back.

"You best be sure." Masterson had said in his western drawl, cocking his pistol. So many other scientists had come there as if it was a parade to watch, security guards prepped and ready to fight Humanity's best. There was apprehension there. As if today was the day they would die. Masterson felt it. He was an old man, so he knew the feeling. If death was to come it wouldn't be from them. At least not today.

When was Halsey ever not right?

She was very much right today as the trainees came rushing, and in their arms, their own pistols in their hands aimed at hostages, they had confronted them all. They were teenagers. Teenagers in the bodies of mythology's warriors.

Helluva standoff.

"Get out of our way." Daisy commanded, with all the realization that she was the supersoldier that they had molded her to be. "Please, we don't want to hurt anybody."

Halsey tilted her head, furrowing her brow. A few of their hostages had very much been roughed up, broken, being dragged by their heels. "And yet you have. You're made to do this now, don't you understand?"

It was an insult to them. Daisy's dirty blonde hair had bobbed as she jostled her own scientist hostage again, digging the muzzle of her gun into the back of his head. Her eyes were of an electric fire. All of their eyes now burned.

"We've seen what you did to Soren! To Fhajad and Serin! Simon died! We all saw it happen! We're nothing but assets to you. You'll just use us up and let us _die!"_

So many bodies, broken and twisted and seemingly mutated. The augmentation process did not go over well with a lot of the class. Enough survived, some died, some were put into comas. But just the sight of it: little bodies, children, in forever pain.

All this to fight terrorists out in the colonies.

Masterson had motioned with his hand for his security to move up, to raise their weapons.

Halsey had something else to draw however as she looked back at him and shook her head, palming his M6 down. From out behind her, like a shadow he didn't notice: a boy.

Masterson knew him well; from Eridanus II he was-

"Please, you can't leave us behind." The boy spoke by Halsey's side. That was it. He was a boy, just like them. Just like Daisy and Ralph. "We can take this together. We've made it this far just think about-" He paused, looking at each of them, remembering their faces. Things would never be the same after today no matter what happened, he know. "Just think about what will happen to us."

Punishment, mass punishment. The boy was pleading for all those that would be left behind.

"Then come with us!" Daisy cried out, gun in her hand still. "We have to go! And we have to go now!" Tear in her eyes, Daisy was pleading for her life, for all those who wanted out from the twisted game, twisted experiment, that the progenitor of which stood before them all and said nothing.

"We can't." John-117 uttered, forced.

Daisy only looked at him with sad eyes. The saddest Masterson had ever seen. "Let's go home."

Masterson had remembered them.

* * *

Chakwas raised her hand in the Normandy's comm room, surrounded by her peers. "I vouch for the Commander's capability with as much tact and understanding as I can in regards to your worries." She explained in the comm room. "She is up. She is mentally aware and cognitive to a degree which is typical for her, and, quite frankly, this move is ignorant of her extraordinary circumstances."

"She threw herself on a grenade, Doctor Chakwas!"

"That's the type of person Shepard is!" Kaiden's voice had risen as Emerson challenged Chakwas.

All hell had broken loose among the entirety of the Normandy crew and they were all had been shoved into the comm room, speaking about the woman they called Commander.

It was supposed to be a routine inspection. They always were of the sort. The Normandy would stop and frisk any ship that had an inch of suspicion about it. Shepard had her intuition about these sorts of things.

Ashley had put four rounds, center mass, into a Human gunman on that rickety old freighter as his body collapsed upon those cowering. On the floor, sitting and bound by chains, had been naked people. Skinny and demeaned and held like cattle. They all screamed or yelled out in agony and surprise as the gunshot rang out and the man's body dropped onto them, they trying to scurry away.

Kaiden pushed forward and kicked the dead man's gun away as he confirmed. "Good shot, Ash." Williams could take only the smallest gratification out of that as they stood above a sea of people, once bound for a worse life. "Commander Shepard, we're good on decks B through H."

"Jesus Christ." Ashley's words were needed as the decompression in her chest, of the wound-up air releasing from her throat, let go. The haze of combat hid horrors, and when the veil was dropped, she saw the reason why she was a Marine: To save the innocent.

Wrex put his head through the chest armor of a Turian as Tali had made sure that no one had gotten the shot on him in engineering of that ship, she standing at the ready with a shotgun as the rest of Hitman secured the ship.

That had left Mai, JD, Garrus, and Shepard, all cornering this one man.

Big, dark, almost black eyes the size of small saucers. Green skin, gills, wiped back heads almost similar to the Asari. It felt right, better, to Mai and JD to hold a gun on this person.

He was a Drell.

This entire ship had been full of diversity, all anchored toward its cargo: people. Humans.

The Drell had been followed by Shepard and her immediate team all the way to the crew deck of that old cargo freighter of Volus design. The stars were to his back as he dragged a young woman, a teenager, by her heels with a grenade by her head and his thumb on the thumb ring for it. Old Krogan design. There he stayed, his back against the glass in that metal corridor as the Normandy's Marines on either side of him converged.

"Stay back!" He yelled in his croaky voice, enough to give even Garrus a run for his money.

Shepard had signaled with her hands to the approaching Marines, having caught them midship.

She was up and at it again. Like a ghost, a living ghost, nay a problem with her save for the several day near painful ordeal she spent in her bed post-Feros.

"_I'm hard to kill." _She explained, and that was that. Everything about the moves to remove her from her position falling silent, but bubbling beneath. She wasn't Human. It wasn't an agreement reached around the crew, but a synchronicity throughout that they all came to that understanding: There was no way she was supposed to be standing and yet here she was, now presently, on the way to Altis, engaged against trafficking of the slave type.

In her kit, in her armor, she was Shepard again.

The Drell had looked at his own situation, surrounded, now way out. "I'll blow us all to the Deep! Come any closer and I'll- I'll-"

"We know." Shepard had answered. These hallways were meant for cargo, wide enough to put a cargo container between, wide enough for Shepard and her fireteam to stand on the opposing wall from the Drell. The young woman was wide eye'd in his grasp, tears streaming from her eyes as she kept rigid and silent, gasping for air between held breaths.

"Commander, may I?" Garrus had opened his mouth as the entire crew of them held their guns on. Mai had been dead silent, frozen, aimed forward.

She'd never had to consider this before: hostages.

JD had heard stories of this exact situation way too many times from his father.

"Go ahead Garrus." Shepard nodded.

"You're in Alliance space, kid," He was a kid. A kid enough that even Garrus could call him that. Not like Drell lived long after all. "You take the surrender here and the Alliance puts you in for thirty years. We can drag this ship about a few hours galactic west and then we can book you beneath Council authority. You want a Turian work station or a cushy Human jail? I know which one I'd put you in."

Another set of rounds, a heart to heart. Shepard and Garrus had their talks from time to time, same as she did with everyone. It was comforting for him. Comforting even as he spoke about the one that got away:

_"Doctor Heart. Hmph. His version of a joke. Refugees would come to him hoping they'd help and he'd just… cut them up."_ Garrus was a police officer, and, JD understood where Shepard didn't, his failures was indicative of something far beyond him. They were of the system he served. That was why a Salarian doctor had been out there cutting up flesh, and Garrus had been useless to stop him when he could've been.

This hadn't been that operation, just trafficking of captured people, but it rang close for Garrus.

"I'll take neither," he screamed out, bucking the girl he was holding. "I'm protected by esteemed businessman Donovan Hock! He'll get these people jobs and safety."

As if that name meant anything, Shepard had figured. Maybe a gangster, some monopoly man with his hand outside of Alliance space paying big money with the old trade of suffering.

"Sure he will." Shepard started, pistol still aimed up. "How many will he turn into glue? Slavery? I know how it goes out here." Out in the wilds of the frontier, where Exogeni could test mind control and Cerberus could play zoo with Thresher Maws, Shepard very much understood the horrors.

"So, you should know who you're messing with." The Drell said with confidence.

"I know enough that he won't lift a finger to help you. You're just a two-bit courier, and this is just one ship."

"Please, Commander Shepard, I don't want to die." The young girl could only beg, finally spoken.

"We'll all be okay." Shepard assured.

Garrus had tightened the grip on his pistol, and JD looked away from his aim at him. He wanted to do something, badly.

The Drell had his head on a swivel as the girl continue to whimper: at the Marines on either side of him closing in and Commander _Shepard _herself facing him down. Let alone the metal monster staring him down.

Mai's voice spoke up. Not over the air, but in radio. A privilege that the two chiefs had in their armor. "I can put a shot through her shoulder into _**its **_lungs." Hidden in plain sight.

Shepard couldn't respond with the same clandestine strategy. She didn't care. "No!" She yelled asides, as if to the air. She didn't want to risk that.

"Headshots only." JD responded. "Thumbs on the trigger. Rigor mortis will do the rest."

"I want you all off this ship! Now! Or I blow us all sky high!" The Drell yelled out.

"You really think that's gonna work?" Garrus bit back.

"You're not going to like the alternative." The Drell responded.

A waiting game. Hostage situations took hours and days. The hostages deserved the rest of their lives. Shepard knew that this situation, this Drell didn't deserve the spit on her lip.

"Can't sit like here all day, kid, galaxy's ending pretty soon and I've got to go stop that. You don't make a move I will."

"You move this grenade goes off." Shepard sneered behind her helmet's mandibles at his threat.

He was scared. Fear was the same in every language, ever culture, every race. She knew this. She had seen this. This boy was afraid.

JD spoke now. "Shepard, I got a trick. Flashbang goes off on my belt and we go for it. Me and Mai have the visors for it."

Garrus had turned away for a moment, feigning checking another angle, hiding his mouth as he basically swallowed the mic to his radio to whisper. "He's got his back to glass. At this range any overpenetration spaces us all."

Shepard had done a visual scan of the area: it wasn't much more than what had already been observed. Just another hallway in another cargo ship. Sometimes simple was best and it was sometimes what was needed.

"Chief Gul?" Shepard turned her head.

"Ma'am?"

"Shield the girl. JD, Garrus, move off."

"Huh?"

Shepard's hands were of blue fire as she threw her gun away. The clatter of its metal in the hallway distracting all of them. Even the Drell. She moved with such urgency and twitch that Mai hadn't quite believed what she saw:

It gave Shepard time and space enough to rush forward and grab the grenade, tearing it out of his hand as the deadman's switch was let go and Shepard's hands were that of a blackness Mai had seen only very recently: that of a biotic bloom. She had ripped the grenade from his hand as she dragged the man out of the way and basically kicked the young woman free, curling into herself as a sphere of biotic energy was put into her arms and she had held the grenade close, doubling onto the ground, encompassing the grenade.

JD had twitched, turning his side over to avoid the blast of the grenade as Mai did as she was told and went for the girl with her own frightening speed, taking her in and almost running off with her down the hall.

The blur of a concussive crack, but the lack of a fiery explosion, made everyone double guess what had just happened as Shepard smoldered on the ground from her stomach.

The Drell was ripped away, surprised, screaming, confused and Garrus had been the first to do something about. The cop in him told him to not do what he did as Shepard keeled over.

But he didn't want to be a cop now. That was why he was out here.

The break of his finger over the trigger, the flash, a frozen image. _Make sure it's steel to his back. _His mind blanked, and when it returned the Drell was on the floor and he held a smoking gun.

Also smoking: Shepard, curled over into herself on the ground.

"Spirits!" Garrus had vocalized what JD or Mai hadn't been able to, the Marines on either side of the hallway rushing in as Mai passed the girl off to them, running to Shepard.

JD had basically flown to Shepard as they all realized what had happened: she had just contained the explosion within herself. Skidding on his knees, he turned her over and went through the mental checklist as his training kicked in:

It all stopped short as Shepard, armor blackened and smoking, reached out like a whip and held the sides of JD's neck through his suit's gaiter, fire and fury in her eye. Soot and ash had been on her lower face and the tips of her red hair had been singed, but she had been very much alive and angry. "I. AM. WALKING. OUT OF HERE."

JD had seen Hell in her eyes and he backed off on his ass, standing up as the impossibility of Shepard standing on her two feet, her entire midsection blackened and charred, born to the world. Still those eyes looked for something: the young girl, scared out of her mind, but within the safety of Hitman. That was enough as she felt the wracking pain in her gut as, in her burnt gloves, the broken pieces of a grenade. Biotics could very much compress matter and isolate it in such a way that made what she just did make sense in theory, but she wasn't a strong biotic by training. She paid for it in some way.

There was a black hole literally brewing over her stomach, petered out as she stood and smoked in her entire form.

"Shepard-" JD tried to interject, however she shook her head as she thumbed her comms shakily.

"Kaiden. Secure this ship. Report it to the nearest sector command. I'll be in Medbay." She croaked out.

"What?!"

Hitman had approached Shepard with an essence of fear. She looked, held herself, more like a wraith with smoke and soot dripping off of her, and she hadn't cared for it as she took her first step back toward the airlock, back toward the Normandy, as the rest of Hitman and her away team let her walk, pain in each step, back to her ship, down to the crew deck, and right into the Medbay itself.

Chakwas had been prepared to take in any of the kidnapped, to aid them and their mistreatment, but Shepard had shown up first with fire on her gut. The surprise on Chakwas' face had been palpable.

"Doc." She simply greeted before she collapsed at her desk.

* * *

There the entire crew had watched Shepard walk as if a wounded animal to the Medbay, and Emerson after the away mission was settled, had riled it up.

The discussion about whether or not Shepard was capable of dealing with her duties had been the only thing on anyone's mind, now having seen what looked like a mad woman having thrown herself on a grenade.

_"That's the type of person Shepard is!"_ Kaiden had supported Shepard. Trusted Shepard. For what particular reason it was beyond him to even explain. A three-way table discussion that spanned the entire ship save for its subject: Those that believed in her, those that didn't, and those that hadn't been sure.

None could live with each other.

Not like this.

The duty of Marines and Seamen had been always on the thin line of service and dedication. The history of the Marines advised their present.

JD, looking from the inside looking out, and also the reverse, had decided this:

What was happening now was something that could've only happened in the Alliance.

The Marines that he had came from had been pragmatic and necessary to a T. The definition of law and conduct all built around a war that had to be fought and an enemy that held no regard to how war was fought. These Alliance Marines, these Humans, had yet to understand what order was in the face of extinction.

What did Shepard mean to people?

To those there on the Normandy, she was harbinger of the Reapers, and it scared people.

Pressly had tried to rile them all down, he did earnestly. This was a continuation of the last meeting immediately after Feros, not less than a week and a half ago, and it had come roaring.

"We have to hold this a vote. If we hold her to the book, we have to do this by the book!" He yelled, arms raised, gloves off now. And yet this wasn't something to be done by the book, not with everyone in attendance from Marine to technician, all trying to get their points in. It all sounded the same and yet unique at the same time. Everyone knew Shepard as something different and yet the base problem was visible, so much.

To count hands wasn't how it was to be done and Pressly had quit trying as he stood there, overwhelmed in the sea of the Normandy. The entire crew had been up in arms about what to do with Shepard and it had been beyond him. It was now, in a word, a _situation_.

"Who gives a _damn _about the type of people we are, respectfully. There is a book of rules, a code of conduct, which we all have to abide by and Shepard is not exempt." Emerson had stood chest to chest with Kaiden as the man poked his armored chest, half of Hitman had been holding their sergeant back as the other half held Kaiden back.

"Shepard is exempt by virtue! Don't you understand!?" Kaiden had shoved off the hands on him. "Her situation is so unique that the entire galaxy rests upon her! We have to support her! Of course we can't understand her!"

"What proof?!" Emerson had yelled out again. "Dreams?! Just because she's facing off against that Turian prick Saren doesn't mean anything about her."

Someone like Shepard didn't exist where they came from, JD and Mai knew. They either died in the first years of the war, or, JD privately thought, they were turned into Mai.

Caught in their own chairs on the comm deck, all the two of them could do was sit as the entire crew congregated into the comm room to voice displeasures and tribulations of unsure futures and, of course, of the Commander Shepard.

"She's been giving the graces of the Galactic community! That has to mean something." Kaiden had argued and Hitman as a whole had groaned. Even the aliens onboard had been there, witness, participants.

"The Council isn't here, lieutenant!" A Hitman yelled back. "We are."

Liara had leaned in to whisper to JD, having found herself in the middle of it all the same. Indeed most of the aliens had corralled around Garrus and JD out of familiarity, much to Mai's chagrin as she sat there in her full armor, unmoving. "Was the Commander's capability really in question?"

JD nodded. "It's… scary, to say the least. You know, her visions."

Liara had nodded once in her small grace. "I could… look into her. Help her."

Mai had, privately, not wanted that at all. She didn't want to snap another Asari neck.

"One thing at a time, Liara." Tali had whispered as another pair of Hitmen were disagreeing among themselves with some of the regular crew.

Garrus had crossed his arms as Wrex, on the other side of the room, just sucked it up.

"I love this shit." He said on his lips.

JD had bumped his still armored elbow into Garrus, his head tilted. "Use your words. I don't got that telepathy you and Chief Gul have." Garrus had chided, and JD had silently chuckled despite the tensity of what was happening before them.

"What's your call on this?" JD was honestly afraid to ask.

Garrus was afraid to answer. "I saw a lot of strange stuff, on my beat. I know what it's like for people to be insane. I don't think that's it for the Commander."

Mai went back into her memory.

She had the ability to make people go insane. She was the shadow in the dark, the mirage around the corner: the reaper come for men and women who flew the flag against the UNSC. She was unstoppable, and yet people fought and fought.

Tristone V, behind Covenant lines. Insurrection holdouts had threatened to not follow the Cole Protocal. Mai had been sent in by Ackerson to scrub the scene. She picked them off for a week. The very last survivor dug a hole for themselves and fired wildly into the forest, yelling of spectres and demons. She killed him in his own grave.

She knew what Shepard was going through wasn't insanity and yet there was nothing she could say. She had no opinion, nor any want to go to bat for Shepard.

"Hmm." Tali had been in her own thoughts, and she spoke quietly to them all. Liara and her shared a seat so she noticed first. "Back on the Migrant Fleet, the Admiralty board does stuff like this in the case of trials and culpability."

The crew spoke of Shepard, speaking for her, always for her. The only thing against her had been what they didn't understand. How much the crew had lambasted against the Council, they themselves were doing on their own, acting like them. That's what split the crew down the middle.

The case for her, the case against her. Did her own crew trust her to lead them into Hell?

One of the Normandy's Marine guard shook his head almost violently to Hitman. "I don't trust a damn whatever you guys say. You were part of Ryder's cult. He's a god damn traitor."

"We could say the same for Shepard being a Spectre," a Hitman bit back. "But we're all professional, here aren't we?"

"The Council trusts her." Kaiden said again, as if it meant something.

Emerson verbalized. "I don't trust the Council worth a damn. Not after what they did to our Commander." Hitman's Commander. Ryder.

"Don't talk to me as if I don't know the man or what he did. I knew their family! Ellen was the one who put this chip inside of my head!" Kaiden gestured to behind his ear where his L2 was in. "They were researching AI!"

Tali's head jerked up as Garrus looked oddly at Hitman.

"Alec was trying to save his wife!" Emerson yelled back, and Hitman had looked away, almost ashamed. "It was a tool. Just a simple tool. Nothing like the Geth, and the Council cast him asides because he was a Human who knew what he was doing in this galaxy. Just like how they cast asides Anderson years ago."

_Early on, when Tali was fresh to the crew. It had hardly even been a month before they got to Feros, but it felt of years. Mai and JD had asked this of her, directly: "Why?"_

_The why of the Geth. Tali had been more than willing to explain, and even understand why the Galaxy had ostracized her people for it._

_It had been because the ancestral Geth asked the ancestral Quarians this: Does this unit have a soul?_

Mai had felt the slot in the back of her own skull distinctly in that moment, and JD had remembered the many smart AIs he had known on ships and in bases, managing Humanity where Humans couldn't. How real they were, how _Human _they were. JD had forgotten they were machines. And yet they died the same.

"The Geth are… worshipping." Tali interjected, loud enough to be heard, head bowed, avoiding the dozens of eyes on her now before she raised up again. "They are worshipping something. Me and Wrex saw it, on Feros. And, from what I understand, the Reapers are some sort of machine gods to them. AI." She switched off her translator at that last word: AI. Spoken in the Human vernacular. She wasn't quite sure why she interjected, but she found her way. She was smart enough, she told herself. "There is danger in them, so what happened to your last commander, I… Shepard, the Commander, she doesn't deserve this standard which you hold her too."

Emerson had looked at Tali, sitting in the shadow of Wrex. He hadn't spoken back however. It was Bannon in her South-African voice. "The standards we hold to Shepard, hun', are by far lower than the standards that this Galaxy knows of her. She is failing even that now by her retaining command."

"What would you do if you were Commander Shepard then?" JD spoke up, a question, not for anyone in particular, but for everyone.

What would you do if you were Commander Shepard, tasked with ancient knowledge, prophecies of doom, and told only you could stop it?

JD didn't need to say that.

Everyone knew what he meant.

Emerson turned away, as did most of Hitman. "That's unfair."

Kaiden had picked up where JD had led. "No, it's completely, she's only Human. As are you. You can imagine it, can't you? A mission that might save lives? Would you follow on it despite detractors?"

"She's _not _Human, though, lieutenant." Emerson cut back. "All of us. All of us!" He spread his arms out to everyone. "We're little people. We're regular. We live our lives, day by day, we are people with names and worries and wants and ideas that are normally understood. I want to live, I want to help this galaxy and Humanity the best way I can: by the book and the rule of law. But Shepard? She does not live by our standards."

"That's crazy-" Kaiden started by Emerson cut him off.

"Stop it." Emerson slashed his hand in the air. "You feel it too, don't you? The Commander? Just being in the room with her, it has never made me feel so secondary and she doesn't even try. She is bigger than life and yet she is down to Earth and she is- by God. I would follow her into Hell, but that's not a choice we can make. She just-" Emerson knew he sounded insane, but it made sense to almost everyone there. Almost everyone. "Following the Commander is to follow something bigger than myself, and I have to, because that is the closest thing to religion that feels real anymore, and it'll kill us all."

Shepard:

She stands at the barricades of war, at Elysium, a pistol in her hand and the blood of the fallen in her heart, charging against pirates come to one of Humanity's colonies. She saved the planet, and more importantly, saved the people that lived there.

She sits alone in a hole, dug with her own two hands as forty of her men and women died around her. Revenge is born in her heart and war begins in her mind as she survives and becomes a renegade paragon of the lost, gunning down those who would impress upon her horror without remorse. It was the right thing to do.

She leads her men with that righteous spirit into the dark hearts of the galaxy, against slavers and pirates as she paints stardust blood red pools that ripple out into distant empires and solitary hearts who look up and see-

"She's a hero." Chakwas nods, making sense of it. "I told myself, if the Alliance was to keep expanding, the Alliance needs its doctors. Good doctors." Chakwas stood against them all. "But the Alliance also needs its _heroes_. Humanity needs its heroes." She had strained, put on that entire last part as if she knew it from someplace within her so intrinsically it was at her very core.

JD had glanced at Mai. The word hero in his mind and he had thought of her, and all she could do was sit there, silently, biding her time.

Kaiden spoke up again. "The very fact that Shepard jumped on a grenade for someone she didn't know tells me she is as sane as she always was."

"If she really is as important as she is, and I know she's smart enough to know that, she wouldn't risk it! For all of our sakes."

"That is Shepard." Kaidan had pointed out again. "No one is too big for her. That's how I know she's the same."

**"I'd hope I was the same."**

The entire room had been to their feet for two reasons, both of them reactions. Reactions to what it was like to have been caught red handed, and another to have been in the presence of the CO on deck. She was there in her hoodie, a tired look on her freckled face, disheveled hair, but she looked okay. There was a juice box in her hand, standard for her biotic supplements, and she sipped with it.

Emerson had faltered with his salute as Shepard softly saluted everyone down. "How much did you hear?"

Shepard didn't answer as she shook her head. The crew had lined the walls of the comm room, even against its railing, as if making way for her to get to the center as fast as she could. It was the assumption that she was going to make a stand, take command.

She only looked to Pressly, an eyebrow raised, and then a shake to her head. Disappointed, but to what no one could tell as she had walked in small steps to the person closest to her.

"Hey, Annel." Shepard stopped at Barbara Annel. A sniper of Hitman. "Forgot to ask if the gloves I got you fit?"

Annel had been rimrod straight. She was Hitman's largest woman, just below the build of Hitman's autogunner Harris. And yet the mass of her relaxed. She was wearing the black, poly-fabric gloves now. "They're good, yeah. Thank you Commander."

Shepard smiled at her. "Oh yeah, I know what it's like with trigger time. Sometimes the gauntlets don't cut it for a rifle. That being said if, maybe, I didn't have gloves like some actually-practicing biotics here, I might've gotten out okay from that last bit."

Shepard drew her gaze out to the Normandy's biotics. They didn't wear gloves, more tactile response and feel for their abilities. "It was impressive, ma'am." One of the said, giving her credit.

"It was stupid. I get that." Shepard shook her head, getting a few laughs out, even from herself. "But you know if I was smart, we wouldn't be here, would we? I never graduated high school for pete's sake."

JD pursed his lips. Neither did he, to be fair.

Mai didn't even know what high school was.

Shepard had slowly made her way up the line, making small talk, easing everyone down as they all stood in silence and disbelief of a walking Shepard.

"Kaiden, getting so heated on my behalf? You in love with me man?" Shepard had joked.

Kaiden had shook his head promptly. "In love with the job, commander."

"Ouch. That's a rejection." That had garnered a wave of soft chuckles throughout the room. It was her magic: talking people down.

_How are you? Get that letter from your daughter? How was the game last night? I tried out your mods on my AR but it's not my cup of tea. Yeah I'll see about that as soon as I can. Tali, holding in fine? How's the wrist? Shotgunning must not be easy for you. Hanging in there Wrex? Always? Yeah sounds about right._

There was nothing Shepard could say to Mai as she passed in front of her and JD, though she did spare a conversation with the shock trooper.

"How're they? The cigs?" Shepard tipped her head at the still armored man. "I'm not a smoker so I really don't get the nuances."

JD had taken the pack out from his chest piece, stuffed safely. Smushed, but not destroyed. "Like water in the desert, Shepard." JD had said with as much comfortable slick as he could muster.

"You got the habit actually?"

He did. Not that he would outright admit it. "Not a bad one to have. Truth be told."

"Fair enough."

It was JD that had been the last as Shepard had found herself at the other end of the comm room, right next to the holographic displays meant for telecommunications. It was a console all the same however. Instead a map of the Galaxy was thrown up, ETA to Altis thrown up: a week or so at current pace. Some stops in between, leads to chase, Geth to kill, favors to do. But that was fast. So much to do, all of it she had asked for.

Her people were silent, eased, but waiting. Shepard had reeled the crowd in from their barking at each other and made it silent. Made it calm.

They deserved more, she believed however. She gave it to them: an explanation.

"I don't get to choose what happens to me. Not at this rate. Not with what the Alliance has done to me. But that's the cost of service, isn't it?" Shepard turned to all of them, her voice soft, and yet stern. She knew the rumors, what Pressly had tried to do. She was a god damn N7 after all. And she wasn't dumb. She knew what she looked like, sometimes, and how ridiculous it might've seen. Yet this wasn't a process she hadn't been unaware of. This was what the Council's skepticism looked like when applied to people closer to home: her own ship.

"I get it. I do. There's something impossibly ancient inside of my head that it takes artifacts from an extinct race to interpret. My mind is a battlefield right now and, yes, that is a… consideration for me." Shepard's eyes darted from face to face, reading them all. "If I were in your shoes, I'd have this same question: Am I making the right choices for all of us?"

Shepard pursed her lips, licking them.

How many men and women had sent brought to die on in her life? She had failed to take care of too many. Far too many.

"Doctor Chakwas. You were just picking shrapnel out of my stomach, and before that, treating me in that last episode." Shepard's voice picked up to command. "Am I okay? Am I physically fit to serve and command?"

The Doctor had assumed her own usual persona now, in her own seat in the comm room, arms crossed over each other in her lap. She nodded. "Yes, Commander. You're still very much in prime condition."

"And mentally?" A cold sweep had gone over the room as people tried to look away. Shepard found no answer, only doubts. "Liara?"

Liara had shaken besides Tali as Shepard called upon her, scared almost to bare that weight. "Yes?" She finally looked up to ask what.

"Would it make sense for the Prothean beacons, for Prothean storage devices, to impart such debilitating conditions, madness, upon recipients? Is that something that happens in what we know of the Prothean relics in this galaxy?"

Liara had blinked a few times. This was academic talk. She was comfortable with this, going into the library of her mind. "No. The only danger would be of the information itself."

"How so?"

Liara had been quick to answer. "If it is… information that's too horrible to comprehend."

What that left had been something Shepard would never admit: that she was worthy to know it. And yet that was the implication throughout. She hadn't become Saren, after all. The jaws of all there had tightened up and looked away still, but they returned to Shepard with this after a silence gone on for long enough:

"I don't get to choose what happens to me," Shepard said again. "But I get to choose how I leave this galaxy, every day." The galaxy itself was to her back from the holographic in the comm room. "I never asked to bare _this _responsibility." She gestured to herself, to her head, to her heart, to her stomach.

Mai tilted her head up at Shepard. "But would you deny it?"

Mai had been the one to talk back and it had felt right.

It was such an odd question, silence surrounding Mai's words. She spoke for everyone and it was immediately cognizant that that had been rare as rain in space.

Shepard and Mai never talked in the rounds the commander took to visit the crew, this was the closest they had gotten: in the middle of the crew, all to bare.

It came so easily to her: "No." Shepard said softly. "I wouldn't wish this on anyone else. It has to be me."

Shepherd. A guide, someone who directs, who tends to those who need to be.

Shepard gazed out to her crew, and they all fell under her gaze. It was that of familiarity, of family, of humanity. It was the gaze that was distinctly of a type of motherhood and Mai had felt herself weak to breath at that moment. She had been healed by Chakwas after Feros, her ribs set back in place and her internal bruising dealt with, and yet then and there she felt her breath turn cold and her heart ache.

"I respectfully ask that I remain aboard the Normandy as its CO and Captain. I ask of you to believe in me as I believe in all of you. If not for my sake, but for this galaxy's. If this actually becomes a problem, feel free to proceed with whatever," Shepard had gestured her hands to the floor. "_**this **_was."

A rogue spectre on the loose, the Geth return from the Veil. Pirates and cretins, the Covenant; all contending with a ghost of Reapers. They were doing nothing to fight them in that room now.

"Any dissenters?" Kaiden had spoken up, looked around, and dared. None had.

Shepard had looked at each of them. At each of them. Her eyes did not lie, did not miss her intentions. She was on a mission, and her crew were the last people she needed doubting her.

"We're going to be enroute to Altis in a few days. We have away missions racked up, leads to chase, but Altis is our next port. If you have any concerns, you know I'm always willing to talk. Dismissed."

* * *

Data pod recovery here, QRF response there, Geth beat down over there, it was a busy week. A blissfully busy week between Shepard taking a stand for herself on the way to Altis. There was a certain amount of shame imparted on all of the crew ever since that day. That any of them _could _doubt Shepard. People kept their heads down in private, doubting themselves in turn, however that was the price that people had to pay to believe.

"Well that's very nice but given what we know of Saren, I seriously doubt he's been buying weapons. Even from Omega." Shepard had cut the line to a would-be informant at a comm buoy on the bridge.

Business as usual.

Business as usual for Shepard in regards to the Saren hunt however had been a little maddening, as sensitive as the term was nowadays. There was a plain and simple truth to Saren and his plans: that it was simple. He sought the Reapers, and that had been so far above any mortal, regular motivation that it was a one-page report in a field where conspiracies ranged histories. The Council wanted it to be more complicated. Fellow Spectres sought for it. And yet at the end of the day, from where she stood, there was no such padding to it.

"Ever been to that side of the galaxy, commander?" Pressly had tried for small talk, but Shepard hadn't been particularly enthused to talk of the miscreants in the Galactic East.

"Not my territory, Pressly. I'd rather stay close to home."

"Fair enough, commander."

Up in the cockpit, Mai had been dressed down, uniform, her tech suit below that as she sat in the secondary seat of the Normandy. She very much was a fast learner as far as Joker saw.

"You're an AI. You've gotta be." He stood over her, arms crossed, a cane in his hand. "I busted my ass for the entirety of my early twenties and all of the sudden you come outta nowhere and are able to do a partial discharge of our drives against a non-standard type comm beacon assembly. You know that shit took me five months to do."

It was like operating a computer more than flying as she knew it, but she was adaptable. She always was.

Hearing Joker's bellyaching, righteous or not, had been cathartic. That yes: she had been able to adapt even now.

She had let go of her breath in the reclined seat as she had locked the rotation of the Normandy, giving time for Joker to climb back into his seat as she raised from her own. "It'd be… advisable, if you keep your confidence if it comes down to ship to ship fighting, lieutenant."

Joker had, half-mocking, waved a hand at her as if to tell her to piss off. "Kinda hard when you're on my ass, spook… How old are you anyway?"

"Classi-" Mai had paused as Joker pulled away from the comm beacon back on route to Altis. "I'm 26."

Everything about her face, it didn't betray that. She looked young. She _was _a young woman.

26.

She had only realized in hindsight, in this universe, that she had probably been one of the youngest Spartans out of both the IIs and IIIs, and it left her oddly off-balance.

"When's your birthday?"

Joker was digging for information, Mai had taken to it with as much of her edginess as when she first showed up in this galaxy. "Why?"

Joker hadn't meant much by it as he flashed an image on his omni. "Birthday chart for the crew."

It was a quick flash, noted in her vision was a flash of a familiar name amongst a large list with the rest of the crew: J. Durante – Ju

It had gone away before she could finish reading.

"So, gonna spill the beans or will I need to be a Spectre?"

A strand of hair had fallen in front of her face by the minute movement of the Normandy going forward. Her eyes focused on it as her mind tried to find an answer. She found nothing. "Thank you, lieutenant." Said with as much brevity and professionalism, that was how Mai left Joker often after these quick, impromptu lessons of flight mechanics in this galaxy.

Passing by the crew, by Shepard even, Mai had been left alone as she was lost in her own memory. She knew, generally, that she was 26. She knew what year she was born: 2526. Though the exactness of it, a detail that she should know, it didn't ring. Lost in her mind, Mai didn't notice Wrex come up to her side as she waited for the elevator down to the well deck.

When she did notice her very veins expanded and Spartan Time had barely eluded her before she remembered where she had been.

Wrex had waited in silence, shoulder to shoulder with her as the elevator came up, depositing Harris and Bannon from Hitman, their jovial conversation cut short by being confronted by the Normandy's monsters.

With a shift of his neck, the two usual bombastful Marines had straightened their expressions and moved out of the elevator, giving Mai and Wrex right of way as they came in and made the elevator, without even signaling it to move, shift downward just the slightest. The door closed behind them.

"You look distracted." Wrex's bass-filled voice had brought Mai to attention fully. She had been.

She didn't give an answer save for raising her omni (how natural it had been to her now) and calling the elevator down.

A ten second ride. She could be civil and "normal" for ten seconds.

He couldn't.

"You're also tainted. Aren't you?"

"What of it?" Mai had spoke out with the grit she was known for. The grit that Wrex wanted.

"Everything." Wrex knew. He knew far more on intuition and Mai had seen it in his eyes. For the first time in a long time, perhaps her entire life, she had seen the eyes of someone who had fought longer, by far longer, than she had even been alive. She had realized that of Wrex in that second in the same realization that Humanity had been losing the war.

It spoke to something small inside of her.

"We fight. Or I tell everyone you're not from _here_."

Mai turned away. It was a tell. Tali had told Wrex that. (_"Look Wrex, if you're ever telling me how to do something and I turn away and answer, chances are I'm wrong, lying, or ashamed.")_

"It's true in some way, ain't it? You don't live as long as me without trusting your gut, your ears, and Hell, what I see with my very own eyes."

The door to the well deck opened. A mat had been already on the floor. Marines had been sparring and on the deck today had been Loke and Liara.

"Come on! What good is biotics gonna do you when you're dead tired and I'm coming for ya?!" Loke had yelled out with all the fury befit her as a pointwoman. Liara had buckled as she had been slammed down on the mat as Garrus and JD cringed (with along with half of the crowd).

That cringe went away as Mai was revealed in the elevator, and JD had, with arms across his chest, raised a hand to greet.

It was nice to be seen.

"Not gonna yell it out. I'm just gonna put it out there, day by day, person by person… Or I won't in exchange for a fight." They were two people who were always to the point, to the edge. It was how they survived. No bullshit, no arguments, just the stakes, the reason why. Wrex wanted a fight, and Mai, with her own intuition, knew he hadn't really cared about the reason of her and JD. "Better you take me on than the one who speaks with hands."

Mai's hand had reached out and grabbed Wrex's wrist before he had stepped out. His armored gauntlet felt the pressure that Shiala's neck broke under. He didn't mind. It was a taste.

"How." Was all Mai could utter through her teeth.

"No armor. None of that suit you got. Just me and you, naked as the day we were hatched. Or about, I understand modesty trust me."

She couldn't remember what day she was born, let alone the date.

"Now?"

"Why not?"

"How hard?"

"A fair fight. Not a deathmatch. I'm not trying to kill you if that's what you're asking."

"You won't."

"No biotics then."

Mai had shot a glare at him that would've killed lesser soldiers.

Wrex had smiled. "It's on. Ready when you are."

Ten seconds and a fight was what she got out of it.

Wrex had approached the Marines, and that had been rare. His place in the well deck had been of his stubbornness. He wasn't a Krogan to be fucked with in any regard, so the world existed around him: it didn't bother him in his private realm. Only Shepard had broken the veil and he had been, oddly, willing to entertain her with chatter.

They spoke of Tuchanka, of the Krogan, of home and of food.

Here today, Wrex spoke to the Marines of the Normandy and told them this:

"Me and her," he pointed at Mai. "We're borrowing this."

Liara had been half way knocked out, breath lost, being pulled to her feet before even she stumbled as the entire nearly twenty strong crowd observing in their PTs froze solid. It was happening.

A rock had been dropped into JD's stomach the second he realized what that meant.

"Woah. You know about this?" Garrus had elbowed the man softly as his expression went into shock.

"No." He hadn't hidden how worriedly he had half-jogged, half-shimmied over to Mai by the Mako. What had been easy to hide in plain sight was this:

He had tapped her shoulder as she came to the back of the Normandy, dragging out the case with her armor stored, crouched over and opening it. She looked at him, and he had known by the furrow of her brow that was on her olive face.

Both of his hands had brought his index and middle finger to his thumbs, rubbing them together as-

She had reached out, grabbed the back of his neck mid-sign, and JD had immediately wondered if this was half of what it felt like to die by her hand. He could hear the frustration on her breath as he had brought him to her level, her mouth almost against his ear.

_"He might compromise us."_

They had remained like that for a second longer than either intended.

"Oh."

"Mm." The hand at the back of his neck had let go and he had straightened his posture. "All he wants is a fight." She said as if no big deal.

JD had wanted to say so much, but Mai hadn't been a normal woman. Anything he could've said was stopped by the very fact that she had been a Spartan.

The IM service of the Normandy exploded, wrists exploding with activity. Those of the Normandy with flesh-implants for their omnis slightly off-put, but realizing why soon enough. Tali had burst out of engineering, locking eyes with Garrus as Liara, still winded, found Garrus's stool to collapse on in her borrowed set of PTs.

Rushing over she was half-excited, half in awe. "I can't believe-" She didn't even need to finish her sentence, basically hopping in front of Garrus.

"Yeah." The Turian rumbled before turning over to the spent Liara. "You alright there T'Soni?"

She held her face in her hands, blindly palming for a water bottle that was found as Garrus passed her it. "I'm good. I'm good… Whatever's about to happen, maybe it'll make me realize it won't ever be as bad."

"Hm." Garrus nodded. He was naked from the top half up for his own PT with Hitman. Only the Turian equivalent of shorts bared. Not that it mattered to the Normandy, his top half had been an armored shell already, technically. He only noticed again when he had caught Tali staring. "You rooting for anyone, Tali?"

"Huh- oh. Uh. Yeah. I mean no."

On the bridge Shepard hadn't been blind to what was happening, seeing the same messages pop up. She had started her rounds today, starting, as always, with Joker. It was there the event had popped. "Ahhhhhh come on Commander. Let me put the auto-pilot on, I gotta see this first hand."

"Joker." Shepard had sterned, motioning to his security screen on the piloting console. It was by far a good enough view.

"I've gotta be there though, taste the sweat and blood myself. Maybe if I start sucking up Chief Gul's stuff I'll get super powers."

"Keep on piloting Joker." It was odd to Joker that Shepard had remained so lax about this. They had just talked about cane designs and she seemed more empassioned about that as opposed to two of her most dangerous assets going at it in her own well deck.

Pressly's appearance had pressed the question. "Ma'am, are you seeing this?"

Kaidan had been in his sleep cycle at the moment, so he hadn't been there. Of course, something like this would've happened now but Shepard couldn't fault him. This was a long time coming.

"Should we get them to stop?"

In a proper, just, 100% by the book world. Yes.

Shepard didn't live in that world.

"Let them fight." Pressly had been shocked to hear Shepard say that. "I'll keep on the pulse of it."

"Hey, hey, hey, taking bets. Fight of the century. The cyborg woman vs the Krogan battle master. Come place your bets!" Ashley had been living it up as she rolled over and over a crowd, more mats put in place in the center of the Well Deck as storage had been moved asides or pulled up as seating. "You, Emerson, you have a hot opinion Chief Gul, what's your call?"

Emerson had been browbeaten and humbled recently, but his disposition remained as he poked at the inside of his cheek with his tongue. Hitman's older members congregating around him, wary of what was happening the same as Pressly up top in the command deck. He had no power or right to stop this, but he would be lying if he said he wasn't interested. "Always bet on Human. 25 creds."

It was all the pomp and exhuberance of seeing this fight that had started off all the commotion. Those off duty had shuffled in from the elevator soon enough, however all the conversation had died down as the weight of two giants set in. Silence before storms had never been so claustrophobic.

The fact that Shepard had yet to make an appearance despite the five minutes since the fight was announced only added to the unease.

She had been doing the rounds all the same, as happy and willing to converse and speak to the hearts of each of them as always, but after Feros? Nothing felt right.

Only the cold drum of space existed as sound, reverberating through the Normandy's hull as the sounds of metallic clacking armor being discarded, put asides, had been heard.

Today was a day for many firsts.

For many this was the first time they had seen a Krogan just about naked.

Just about.

"Quads are important." Wrex made emphasis as he patted the spandex like armored cod piece around his waist and noted section. Still, beneath that, his chest, his body, it spoke to natural armor. He was like a standing beetle almost, from dark colored flesh to the distinctive hood extending from his back. Wrex had been a dark maroon, scars and stripes all the same from hundreds of years of war.

It was when he straightened his posture something was revealed: Seven foot four. Taller than Mai's six foot seven out of her armor.

The figures they imposed had been like nothing anyone had seen as Mai was the last to disrobe on her side of the deck.

She was borne to all: Naked, but not as she was the day she was born.

All the men had looked, all the women had looked, and they saw the body of someone who had existed as something more. Like the molded statues of ancient religions and cultures, Mai had been the flesh incarnate of the body of a warrior. Every single piece of her that could've been a muscle had been a muscle strained and large and almost sculpted to a scientific image. On her breasts had been scars and bruises from battles in the past, injuries that would've killed lesser people. She was not lesser as her tech suit had gone to the floor and nothing else had been there beneath it.

She looked at JD, in all of this, and JD had seen the most Human she had been, physically, then and there. Forced in front of him and he had seen what she was as the entire Normandy saw.

Alone, they had remained, gaze locked.

Mai had paused for a few, stretched seconds, JD being brought into focus in all of this as he looked up at her and tilted his head, awaiting.

"Do you have medical tape?"

JD had nodded urgently, going into his pack and taking out the white tape meant for binding and splinting.

It was rare, and immediately noticed, that they had felt each other's skin. Her fingers grabbing the roll had felt his own fingertips and it stayed in her mind as JD looked away. He had just been about breast height with her and ducked down back into his locker. When he emerged, tape had been unfurled and the Normandy looked on and watched.

They watched the white lines of the tape wrap around her hands, her knuckles, torn by her teeth as she had gone from that to her chest.

JD had gone to offer something else but he had only been confronted with Mai again.

A hand had cupped at her chest, brought to her, her hand holding the tape moving in one circle around that hand.

Of the female ODSTs he knew, some had been as gifted enough to necessitate even this on the fly. They needed help. JD had never been as close to any of them to do as they asked, but he had gotten the gist, surprised that Mai had asked. Then again, if there was an underlying layer to it, a tension, she didn't know of it, didn't care for it.

Sucking in a breath, more than well aware that the entire Normandy had been watching, he had done his best as he had grabbed the tape and Mai outstretched her wingspan and turned around.

Tape was tape, he had to apply, pressing down upon her breasts from behind with it and wrapping them up.

One million things through his mind: his proximity to Mai, the way her bare skin smelled or how she had felt as he had wrapped her chest in tape. By God, what would his parents think (_what would Dawn think?) _if they saw this.

She smelled like death, permeated it.

His hands brushed against a necklace. A wooden wheel. Hers.

"Why-?" Garrus had sat by Tali on his table on the other end as she also pulled up, absent-mindedly leaning her own head against his shoulder in a quickly. He had leaned in return. The nuances of Quarian and Turian physicality lined up in certain ways. It wasn't particularly affectionate, but rather an acknowledgement of comfortability next to him as he scooted a bit to give her room. He had gestured to what Mai and JD had been doing.

Tali had answered before the rest of the question came, absent mindedly adjusting her own suit around her relevant area. "She has _quite_ a bulkhead, by many standards." Tali quietly whispered into his ear canal. "Bigger is better, usually, but uh, a lot of… loose tolerances might come into play with what we're about to see." Mai was proportional to say the least.

Garrus crossed his arms as he had taken the opportunity to look Mai up and down. "Hm. Well, at least I'm not feeling anything looking at this."

"You mean in, like, feeling things looking at a Human female or just the idea of…" Tali had glanced at her omni and at the translator overlay that was there just in case, making sure the word for- "Boobs?" Had turned out as she intended to.

Garrus shook his head a few times as JD finished wrapping Mai's up. He knew his type: A woman that could beat him up, surely, but if Mai was in that position, he wasn't quite sure. "I like to keep an open mind, I guess. I've uh, always been up to new experiences, clearly." He gestured up to the entire mission of it and the now: a Krogan about to throwdown with a Human super soldier.

"Hm. Noted." There was a little overblown seduction put in her last words on purpose. For a few seconds Tali had thought Garrus was going to let that past, but he had done a double take in due time. Intrigued, but also realizing what she was doing: teasing. The tone gave it away as she started to giggle.

"You're mean… and no. I mean. Look at her. Does any of that look natural to you?"

"Keelah." Tali had responded almost dreamily. "If I had that sort of body…" Liara had taken Garrus's stool, basically in between their legs with how people were grouped up along the sides to watch. She turned around, giving the Quarian an odd look with an eyebrow raised. "I mean, just… Look at me. I'm skin and bones. If I could be like her, fight like her, **I **could've been my Pilgrimage gift to my people."

"I want to tell you not to do this." JD knew her as she finished getting ready. He had known her better than anyone in the last twenty years had, as low of a bar as that had been. Because of that however he knew that he couldn't do anything.

"Will you?" She looked down at him. Binded at her chest, shorts, strained and also tied with paracord around her waist, put on. Her expression was soft, not the serious he expected heading into battle, into a fight.

"I know the answer." There was no privacy for them save the privacy given by waiting and sound. He spoke lowly, both in tone and for that privacy.

Mai wanted to respond, to assure, but she had known him too. It was in his nature to worry. A slight tapping motion had bobbed against her sternum. She had forgotten the feeling, lost with how long she often went with it clamped down between her skin and her techsuit.

Her necklace. The Wheel of Dharma made from wood. Made, forged, in the downtime after her first deployment as a Headhunter. The person that made her do it inside of her had done it as her last breath: making her existence physical in this world along with the memory of her last name: Gul.

Mai didn't know why she had done it, why she had carved up this very memory of something she remembered her mother wear. It served no tactical purpose and yet… She wasn't supposed to understand. This wasn't hers. This wasn't the Mai Gul that her mother knew that had made this necklace.

She wondered, vaguely, if it was a birthday gift to herself.

It was unnatural, the feeling of her reaching behind her neck and taking it off, holding it in front of her and seeing it exist away from her.

This had been the first time in over ten years it had been removed from her. She thought of, time to time, between upgrades and renovations of MJOLNIR, that she might've taken it off, held it someway else because of the inherent issues with the techsuit's seal and necklaces. Though when she tried, and she did remember these moments, she found it wrong to not do so.

The difference between then and now had been-

"Can you hold onto this for me?" She had offered and JD had felt it deep. She had felt it deep in her what she had just asked and it stirred her stomach.

He nodded urgently, brought from a brooding, a palm up and out. Gently, she lowered it, paracord rope and wooden image, into it.

"Thank you." She said so quietly it had barely manifested in air.

JD had been silent, looking at her, and then it.

This was a piece of her. Something that existed outside of her being a Spartan and she had, for a reason he didn't dare confront, trusted him with it. Maybe it was because he was the only one she could trust, maybe it was just tactical in nature. Maybe he was just reading too into it as Mai looked down on him and was assured.

The wood, and he had known his fair share about it from high school vocational education, was not meant for the shape she had molded it into by knife about the size of a cracker. Crude, unrefined, but a shape nonetheless.

The shape meant to represent rebirth, souls, a constant cycle of suffering and living.

It wouldn't fit in his pocket well, he didn't trust his grip with it, there was only one other place he could carry it himself: Around his neck himself. "You don't mind?"

She shook her head. Far from it. Far enough from just minding that she was captivated by how it sat on his own chest, a bit long, yes, given the differences in their own proportions, but it just felt right to her as he had tucked it into his shirt alongside his dog tags.

"What's the hold up?" Wrex had called out to them from the other side. "The sooner we do this, the better."

Rationally, he was correct, and Mai's complacent face had gone hard at that moment, leaving JD to follow in her wake.

As Mai approached, the sparring mats that had been put down had, even when the space was doubled, seemed wholly inadequate. The space got darker, the lights got brighter, and with nothing left to wait for Wrex had found himself on one side of the ring.

Ashley had been the usual ring leader for sparring matches. Sparring matches, on Garrus's and Emerson's recommendation, had been a regular thing during PT and not unheard of across the Alliance Navy. Everyone knew what they looked like.

This wasn't sparring however.

This was a fight.

* * *

Ashley stepped in to moderate. "Okay best two out of-"

"Shut up." Wrex had shut her down as she tried, and she eked back out.

Mai had entered through a hole in the crowd, made for her, JD filling it as she entered, opposite of where Garrus and the rest of the aliens of the Normandy had watched on from.

Emerson had appeared with several of the Marines, not solely from Hitman. They had guns in their hands. "This gets too out of it…" He didn't want to finish his sentence.

"I think you'll need more than those for one of us alone." That, Mai had stubbornly agreed, was true. "We go until we see who wins."

And what the hell did that mean, no one knew.

Shepard hadn't shown up yet, but the momentum had been too great to stop.

There was no initiation to combat, just an understanding. There was always that understanding between the two of them: that there was something killable beneath themselves. That they had existed as special in their respective warfighting categories and, more than that, they had been the final words of their profession.

More and more the crowd of the Normandy had backed up, more and more. It was becoming less about watching and more about not getting in the way.

That's why Mai didn't start when Wrex walked forward, into the center of the mats, a meter and a half away, looking her over as a prey does, tilting heads, narrowed eyes, taking all of her in. "A thousand years of living, and there's always something new to fight."

Mai hadn't assumed a stance, not yet, tilting her head as well as she moved, walking, in an orbit around Wrex. One step at a time, it had been like she was in slow motion, looking at him. Wrex was unmoving, almost soaking up the attention as he stared straight ahead.

She reminded him of a Hunter. And yet she couldn't be as impersonal as that. This was a person.

As loathe as she was to admit, she knew that now: every single one of these aliens was a person.

This galaxy had changed them.

She had completed the rotation, standing front to front with him.

"Tell me, your armor. What is it?" Wrex had motioned to the case.

"A force multiplier." She answered. "And yours?"

Wrex had his own case with his family armor, still there by his corner. It was his bed now: a sheet lain on top of it. "A memory."

"Let's go." Her hands had formed fists, covered with medical tape.

Wrex nodded, his voice neutral. "Right."

First shot advantage. That was what they taught her at Onyx.

So, she had stepped forward first, arms up, almost crossed, right arm posed to swing down as she moved. The air had responded, the woosh of their movements heard.

For something so big, Mai had been surprised Wrex had backpedaled as fast as he did. The look on his face changed from his stoic, to a smirk. As her right fist came down, she rotated her arm, using the momentum to bring her elbow to bare as she kept moving forward, going to swipe at his head.

Elbow met elbow as Wrex stopped backpedaling and took it, sending a swipe of his own bony elbow to meet. The force of the two meeting had thrown both of them asides the mat in the same direction, yet their footing had stayed true, remaining in front of each other as on the uptake they both threw hooks at each other, only to see them coming, both rolling back.

There was no moment of pause, to recognize that the two of them had been better than expected. There was only more fighting.

Wrex had been on the forward movement as Mai purposefully moved back more than she needed to recover. She saw his fisted claw reach out at her toward her neck for a punch, however a hand of hers rose, not to grab, but to direct away as she moved the top half of her body back, moving around his reach, only to take her own momentum and move behind him.

It wasn't to her advantage however. The Krogan body was made to weather hits from the back. So she did nothing as Wrex turned around, back hand seen by Mai in the movement.

Like a clamp, both her arms had gone up, catching his punching arm in between like a vice with her forearms.

In the first flurry of movement and attacks which the crowd had barely been able to process, it was this that had caused them their first pause.

Wrex was pleased as she did it, knowing the hand closest to his face having balled up and-

A thwack. It was if the skin had become bone and the bone had broken.

With all the mass of a vending machine Wrex took the punch, stumbling the side as the first shred of fist wrap came undone.

The claws on his feet tapped against the mats as he readjusted from it. Barely enough time for him to see Mai come at him again. Her arms had been the weapons, held like bars almost, her elbows point of attack as she had thrown out his arms to bare his chest and face to herself. Every attack meant for his head had been an upward swing due to the height difference, but every punch that landed had been like punching stone.

Wrex, angling his body from the onslaught, had let her punch flatly, unable to follow through with her movement, stopping her as he leaned forward, wrapping his arms around her before she could react.

Twirling her around in her grasp, Mai had been thrown after three revolutions, barely off the mat as Wrex followed her flight, putting his foot down on her side and rolling her back into the mat's space as the crowd nearest scrambled away.

Mai rolled further, forcing herself to keep going before she righted to her feet, a crouch at least. That was all she could manage before Wrex had rushed over like a bull and put a knee, almost to her face. Her arms had put an X over her face as she blocked it, being sent back again as she felt Wrex's mass be put into every strike.

It was a familiar mass. Again, like a Hunter, or even a Brute, but there was so much more refinement in Wrex that Mai had recognized.

The skin on her knees had been torn off by the pure friction of her taking a knee, taking another blocked strike from Wrex's armored knees before she pushed back against from her position, sending Wrex back.

Her bones felt like steel. Wrex could tell. If he was rock, she was the metal, bent and burnt on Tuchanka.

She rushed forward, arms out as Wrex tucked himself down, refusing to be picked up as Mai seized his midsection. The mat was torn beneath him as she put his foot down and met her full stride. His own elbows landed strikes against her back, breaking her down in her grip around, but she refused to let go as the pain of bone breaking blunts threatened to tear her backside apart.

She growled, twisting her body, like an crocodile's death spiral, finally sending Wrex off his feet onto his head as she slid down again and grabbed his legs, hoisting him up.

She hoisted him up.

That, by itself, was a statement.

Returning the favor, she had tossed him onto his side a few feet opposite. Running up to him his hand only reached out to punch her ankle. He had caught it, and it would've torn off her foot had she not been who she was. Falling over him into a roll it had given Wrex enough time to get back onto his feet, charging at her as she returned the favor and met him half way:

Two bulls had met, growling, spit in their mouths dripping to the mats as Mai was overpowered and sent to the ground again, pinned. Not a second passed before Wrex wound his hand back for a punch into her gut. Mai couldn't avoid it, but she had turned, offering her side profile instead of her stomach as the punch came down and the Normandy rumbled from the strike through her. Lifting her legs up beneath Wrex, she rolled him up and over, now he was on his back as Mai had gotten up.

The second her pathways from stomach to mouth had been straightened a piece of her lunch had been spit back up with globs of blood.

Wrex was the type to not let up, so he had been back at her the second he had been able. It was time enough for Mai to plant her feet and remember his weight.

Every attack he had leaned into. His advantage had been his top half.

In this charge at least, she had jumped, clearing the seven feet necessary and landing on the other side of him. Wrex didn't need to turn, he was turned by her as she took one of his shoulders and threw him out open again.

How many hearts did Krogan have? One might've stopped as Mai wound up her own fist and threw one forward, dead center. The sound of what might've been ground breaking, of a crag shearing, was heard as Wrex let out one big gasp, and at the mat, his very skin had dropped like shards.

Beneath her feet it had pierced her soles, but she cared nothing for it as she continued onward before Wrex processed the pain. Taking one of his arms again, he tried pulling her back, however her head flying forward had only meant his own sternum in a blunt, making him recoil down as she reached up to the back of his head and down to her knee.

"_**Fuck!"**_

The first word of the fight had been as elegant as how it turned out to be, Wrex using his free arm again to Mai as it grabbed the knee that opened up a vein in his nose and pulled it out from beneath her.

Like a windmill, Wrex dragged her beneath himself, throwing herself up, holding her, her momentum held and focused onto the ground where she hit with another reverb that could be felt through the Normandy.

Mai's head bounced against the patted floor, and even then, it wasn't enough as Wrex dragged her again by her leg and repeated the motion in reverse.

She tucked herself in, despite seeing the haze and the echo of her brain being tossed in her own skull, bracing for each swing, back and forth until the claws of Wrex slipped, cutting a bright red line across her thigh as she sucked in breath in pain.

It had been a long time since she had suffered an open wound like that, but it was no matter. The feeling kept her alive as she moved onto her belly, clawing herself forward and onto her feet again.

Nothing else in this world mattered. Nothing was there. It was just the ring, and Wrex.

His expression had been that of someone enjoying themselves.

Hers was the same.

She rushed forward again arms up, throwing her full mass into just being against Wrex before twirling around, her own backhand thrown as it made contact with Wrex's side. She didn't know the anatomy of Krogan, but her knuckles through her tape felt bone.

Contact made a whipping sound, Wrex moving his arms down to try and seize or break her arm. She wouldn't have it as her red drenched leg came up to his midsection in a kick, upwardly focused.

Spartan Time had long since kicked in, and yet, despite this, Wrex still moved with a quickness that betrayed him. She savored him being on his back and his stomach exposed as she brought her leg up and did what he couldn't: land one mid.

She didn't stomp him. She wanted to stomp the floor beneath him, metal and all, and she very much tried as Wrex tried to catch her leg, barely stopping her from doing her full damage as they both felt some internal organs inside of him get bruised.

Wrex tried to push her off from her leg, but she wouldn't dare, in between her toes as she pressed down on him she felt the very internals of his body shift and move and there was no hiding the wince in his eye.

Wrex only twisted her again, but it didn't send her to the ground. Like a ballerina she found her footing as Wrex, hunched over, stood front to front with her again.

"45 seconds and we're already bleeding, huh?" Wrex wiped his claws across his face.

His nose was dripping with Krogan blood, yellow and oranges combined, adding to the red spotting the field from Mai's leg.

Mai's fingernails bit through the wrapping of her hand as she raised them again.

No conversation. Wrex nodded, emulating, before going right back at it in a storm of arms and beating.

* * *

The best the crowd could describe the next five minutes was give and take and elasticity. As in no one had known how far they could stretch themselves before something broke.

Every punch, every hit, it seemed like it broke something. Every hit was a wince amongst the crowd as those more squeamish backed off even further as the perimeter of the mats no longer was set in stone.

And yet still they kept fighting.

Mai had gotten Wrex to hunch over more, a flurry of strikes coming between his eyes at once in between being banged against her knee. However he had taken each and every single one with a knowledge of pain. This was nothing new as instead on the uptake from a knee strike he charged forward again, getting Mai onto her back and held as he winded up another punch and landed it on her upper torso. The first one took her breath away. The second one took the expression out of her face as she bared her teeth and blood erupted from her nose herself.

_Breath. Just breath._

There was no sound to her life now. Her senses shutting down, donating themselves to the fight.

Any sound that she could hear was muted as she closed her eyes and felt another strike come down against her chest.

Chakwas had fixed her already. It took an hour, but her ribs her set in stone again. It wasn't as if Wrex had implicitly aimed for her lungs, but this was a fight where nothing was sacred.

Mai's legs fell in between Wrex's as he was held over her, forcibly spreading her own wide had put Wrex's in a spread that he couldn't take, only to fall on Mai fully.

Mai had slid from beneath him, carrying whatever had fallen off or from him all the while.

Going in naked was right. It was getting messy. The smell had been of sweat and blood.

No one would be remised to say however that this hadn't been what they expected.

Mai hadn't gotten far enough away as Wrex had singled out an uppercut. Square of her face. The whiplash again had sent her to the ground on her back, but her teeth had cut into his own knuckles on his claws.

She tasted his blood in her mouth. That was the first thing she noticed before she realized she had been on her back again and her body automatically rolled away from him to be righted.

She swallowed it, panting.

Seconds, minutes, hours, maybe days. That's how long it felt like they had been fighting now.

And for what? A secret?

For Wrex, he remembered what he told Shepard:

_"Do you do what you do because it simply is something you have to do?"_

For Shepard, it meant she had to be Shepard, and whatever that meant.

For himself, it meant that he had to fight, because he was a Krogan. It was within his blood to fight, and to keep fighting, and to keep finding a fight. It was why he was here on the Normandy in a part larger than he would let on.

Some of Mai's blood had gotten on his claws, and he had seen its deep red. He ran his face down with it, and it matched oh so well with his own natural color.

What was her do? What was this human's why?

Maybe it was the same as his own. It was perhaps a reason why she had been fighting him to a standstill.

Only Matriarchs and Spectres had ever given him this much of a fight, and even then, it would've been over by now. This felt like it could've gone on forever.

Not that that was a negative. No. It was a testament to his opponent.

Mai had run a black eye now. A side of her face engorged and darkened from a strike.

Some of his own chest plates were shattered and broken now, his scales tender and almost ripped off.

Despite that, there was an unspoken agreement that had been made even midfight: No biting, no tearing, no gouging. There was a respect there that had been established.

Not that this fighting had looked respectable.

Mai came at him again, going for his chest. It was the largest target, and he had only done his best to be a wall. Any movement left or right, to dodge, would be far more disadvantageous to him. She knew how to grapple, even with someone as big as him.

Even if he didn't tell anyone, he himself held within him that she learned to fight not of this galaxy. He could tell with each blow, with each strike, with each-

Some shards from a plate had stuck to his skin, only to be punched in by Mai as she landed a strike, and he had felt the lightning of pain. The only thing that can kill a Krogan is another Krogan, so this was a little closer on the mark than herself. He reached up, trying to dig into his own flesh to get those shards out, but Mai wouldn't let him, attacking his arms instead with altering punches, putting more and more strain on thousand-year old bones.

He had something to prove here as much as she did.

He felt for her last punch, the one she put into this last series, and instead met it half way with her claws, seizing her fist.

He assumed his stance, that of ancient monsters, and planted to the floor as he put his shadow over her. Squeezing her fist in its ball, he had put his strength into it as she was forced into a kneel.

"Your bones, ghoul, they would've broken by now. _**Who are you?" **_The spit in his mouth pattered her face.

It was as if her fist was being compressed by a vacuum chamber as her other arm went up to try and dig beneath Wrex's claw and get rid of the grip, but there was nothing but skin and bone being compressed into a ball.

Her breaths became ragged as pure pain came through her veins. Constant pain, coming from her hand.

If this was war, a real fight, she knew what she would've done. Nothing could break Wrex's grip and the hand had been lost. If her blade had been with her…

Her mind in the blur of adrenaline had iron-blooded pain found its solution as she ripped herself back and swept her legs beneath Wrex, sending him to the floor as she wrest her hand free, the distance between them big enough for Mai to tuck her hand into her stomach to numb.

He was top heavy. Top heavy. The emphasis in her mind replaced the pain.

Wrex had roared. For the first time in this fight, he roared. He challenged her. She opened her eyes truly and saw him, and all she could do was roar back with a ragged voice. The loudest she had been in that galaxy yet.

With the force that could've compromised the Normady, the two locked together in a charge. In a headbutt, that, as the two recoiled from it, Mai had assumed who she was.

As Wrex recoiled back, Mai had let her body take over from her own daze and her leg reached out, not trying to slip Wrex out and to the ground, but his upper thigh. The first kick against his right leg and made his standing waver, but before Wrex could do another Mai had been out of his sight. He could only feel a strike against his leg again as he kept turning to try and face her.

He could only feel the pain as his leg buckled beneath kicks.

Mai was circling him, teeth bared, slowed down. Anytime Wrex tried to face her down she had robbed him of his firm footing by landing hits against his leg. His own body worked against him as he kept trying to turn, but kept falling, getting up, but buckling all the same.

What did it mean to be brought down to her level?

Even Mai didn't know, but to see Wrex below her, it did something to her. This was how it was supposed to be.

For a full minute, this cycle went, stuck in this motion as Mai assumed a more ominous form, looking down on Wrex as he tried to stand on his feet. He was ineffectual until Mai had let him stand.

They stood opposite of each other again, but no attack was pressed on either side. The only sound was of their breaths, hot and heavy. It was just a moment, of recognition: That they had been driven to this point by each other.

Breath. Mai remembered how hard it had hurt when her own was taken from her.

No Elite had ever gotten her to this level, that was for sure.

Wrex had taken a slow step forward to attack again, but then he had bursted forward.

Mai had been too far gone however, she was now silent, intangible, as each punch was met with nothing in return, only the flashing visage of her dodging each punch, being slightly out of his reach.

The flame that burned twice as bright, lasted half as long. A flame that burned for over a thousand years was perhaps overdue.

That was all Mai would let Wrex do: attack. Attack and attack and attack until the nearly imperceptible fatigue had set in.

It was on that beleaguered punch she sprung.

Right into his lungs, his neck.

Any breath he tried to draw in, it was robbed.

_"Center your breathing, match mine."_

Mai matched Wrex's.

Each time he had tried to take a breath, Mai put in a punch. Each one measured, slowed down from what she had done earlier. Each inhale was replaced by a strike, each morsel of air replaced with pain as Wrex knew what it was like to drown.

By the time Wrex had been truly breathless, bent over to allow his lungs to fill at all, Mai had found her chance: With her elbow again, torn up and bloody, she had swung up against Wrex's neck, sending his whiplash back as he spit up.

He seemed slower as he stumbled back, a glossy look in his eyes as Mai didn't rush toward him, but walked:

He put up his fists again.

Mai had put another punch right between them.

His head jostled back again, and he was slower still.

He wanted to keep fighting, hands up, but his wrists were limp.

Another crack, and Wrex had been continually stepping back, his footing uneasy.

His claws hadn't even gotten half way up as his back hunched over unknowingly.

Every crack was like thunder through a canyon, and each of these against Wrex now had been that of meat being processed.

Mai had taken in a breath, and Wrex tried to breath in his. He didn't.

* * *

No cheering, no booing, nothing. Throughout the entire fight people had been dead silent as they saw two monsters go head to head. There was nothing to be said, and only everything to be experienced.

Each hit resounded in their heads as if they had been hit. Each punch striking through teeth. Everyone there had realized how fragile each of themselves had been.

Tali had rolled herself up next to Garrus, holding her legs at her knees as if keeping herself together as Liara looked on in horror. Garrus, the career law enforcement officer, had seen varren and vorcha fighting rings softer than this.

The rest of the Marines had only stood there, wide eye'd and unbelieving, on two measures:

A human, with only herself, had been going toe to toe with a Krogan battle master with everything to show for herself.

The other measure had been this: Mai did not need her armor to fight like she did. She fought without mercy. Without that toward her enemy, and toward herself.

She looked terrible.

Absolutely terrible.

Like a spear, her last punch seemingly went right through Wrex's head as he, momentarily, went limp, and collapsed onto his arms, on his back, with Mai's shadow over him.

Victory?

No.

Not yet.

Mai had kneeled down and taken him by his natural collar, rolling her fist back, and all those there had learned what a Krogan's head looked like as a punching bag as Wrex's arms gave out and he collapsed on his back, held up only by her grip.

It wasn't a wild flurry of hits. Just three punches. Each one a period on that fight.

As if it was the last few before the surface broke.

On the first: The elevator to the well deck opened.

On the second: the crowd dispersed, having seen enough, and far more than they ever bargained for.

On the third: Shepard was there, over Mai, mouth open, about to say that was enough. Mai had opened her mouth first.

**"I'm done."**

Shepard was taken aback, eyes wide, as Wrex below had laughed a laugh meant for joy. No rhyme or reason, just laughter, echoing throughout the well deck that was of triumph as he had rolled over to his side and shown his new face: broken and bent askew, but still very much distinctly him as it dripped with blood.

The Marines had melted into the shadows and the only one who dared stand where he had during this entire ordeal had been JD.

One of his claws had reached up, patting Mai's shoulder. "Deal's a deal."

Behind Shepard had been Chakwas, the look on Shepard's face: unamused. "Doc?"

Mai and Wrex stood ramrod straight despite everything. They were still ready to keep fighting, even if Wrex had an eye nearly out of his socket and Mai had bruises on every inch of her.

The mats below were ruined and wet. Half Mai, half Wrex. Organic fluid gotten loose and it had been an issue of hazmat beyond the Normandy's proper capability.

Chief Weston was sought out near the Mako by Shepard as the Normandy's requisitions chief. He knew the deal, eyeing up the mess as Chakwas waved her omni up and down the two fighters. "Don't clean it up." Shepard had said with a sharp bite. "But order new ones for Altis. Sparring is a proper PT activity, but this… This was…"

"They're…" Chakwas couldn't believe her readings. "Nothing too permanent. Nothing broken."

"Not out of lack of trying." Wrex had spoken and, surprisingly, Mai had nodded.

Chakwas had gone to apply bandages, aid, but Shepard had stopped her. "You two. This kind of fight, you know very well that this was out of line."

"Why'd you let it happen then, Shepard?" Wrex posed.

There was a glare to her eyebrows. "Because the second I was on an away mission you would've tried. You would've jumped Chief Gul." Shepard knew, and she wasn't wrong. "At least this I knew how and where it was going to happen."

Wrex snorted in admission.

Shepard turned to Gul. "Chief Gul, you're so wrapped up in red tape and black ink I don't even think I know how to reprimand you officially for this." Mai had been emotionless even as she bleed from everywhere, slowly pooling beneath herself. "But this wasn't official, and neither is this. You two, clean this up, you get no help from anyone else… Chief Durante!"

Shepard snapped at JD and he had responded with a snap to attention. "Yes ma'am."

"Unless she's about to drop dead, do not help her. I know how you are; god bless you, but not here. Not now. The only people healing them are each other."

It was that that made Mai twitch in her face.

If it hadn't been for the veil of sweat and blood, Shepard would've noticed. The tell however had been far beyond physicality. The tell for Mai's displeasure was JD's reaction: he was torn. Between two things. What those were, Shepard could barely taste, but it was there, and it fought against him.

She remembered JD's introduction to Liara after Therum. Perhaps…

"Private!?" She said with a tone of command as JD was conflicted.

"Ma'am!" He responded. He shouldn't have.

Wrex had chuckled as the silence that followed his report echoed.

* * *

Cameron Masterson stared, eye to eye with Doctor Halsey. On her glass table, a letter of resignation. The year was 2531. The Covenant had begun their crusade and he was done with Humanity. He had a ranch back on Earth, far away from Reach, where he was planning on spending the rest of his natural, god given life. It wouldn't be long, after all. What the scotch was doing to his liver wasn't kind.

He was completely sober when he had stormed into her office that last day on Reach however.

"I'm not the one you're to do this with." She said dismissively, not even looking from her report of god knows what. "HR is in the other wing."

Masterson hadn't cared. "Oh no. I know this. But you're the reason why." Masterson slid his papers for resignation in front of her:

_I resign from any involvement and position within the SPARTAN-II Program, effective immediately_.

"Unsurprisingly, honestly." Halsey still hadn't looked up, using a stylus to continue writing notes as on another datapad statistics came running in. "We know your communications with your superiors have been distasteful ever since they were augmented."

"You're a heartless bitch, you know that? Hiding behind this veneer of necessary progress and the need for Spart- for whatever _this is." _She was hardly perturbed by his insulting, working ever onward. "God dammit." Masterson said to himself, slumped into his chair. "I can't believe it."

"Believe what, Masterson? That it took you twenty years to realize what you were doing, and then delude yourself into think that this wasn't for the greater good?"

"Greater good?!" Masterson snapped in his chair. "What greater good is there that justifies me **kidnapping children?!**"

That was his original tasking when he was assigned to her: He was the procurement specialist. He was the one who went into the colonies and stole the children from their homes. He was the one who took them, and they never knew.

"Saving the Human race. Have you not seen what they're doing out there? How much hope they inspire and what damage they do?"

"But at what cost?" Masterson pleaded with her. It was as plain as day to him, and wherever he went on Reach, to Mendez or his peers, all that he had seen were people who justified the very base fact that they had kidnapped young children and indoctrinated them into war machines. All of it was dressage for that base fact.

Halsey had sighed. "An ONI agent with morals? Don't be so vain. You've done the deed once, that will never be undone. None of this work will ever be now. You're a hero for what you've done. You did the hard things that enabled all this progress."

"And I wish I never did. By God." Halsey said nothing, justifying nothing. She would give Masterson nothing to respond to. It wasn't his place to be there, or to say the things he did. But he had to. It tore at his soul and he needed to cry out. If not for him, but on behalf of those who called themselves Spartan now. "Do you know that the head office has some new directive in place for them?" Halsey had known what he was about to say. He knew because she stopped what she was doing, as if to brace for what he said next. "Any Spartan casualties will be labeled as _missing in action_, regardless of what happened to them."

"A morale booster to be sure. Truly my Spartans ability to impose on the battlefield deserve such impression."

"God dammit woman," Masterson stood up, pushing his chair back. "God dammit! Don't you see? _Spartans never die. _Isn't that a tragedy?"

"Is it?" Halsey glared at him from her seat. "It sounds like a blessing in war."

Masterson had been hysterical, raising a hand to his head as it shook, disbelief on his face. "One of the most Human things that we can do is die, Halsey. **We've taken that from them**."

Masterson had a family; he had a daughter. _Had_ a daughter. Colette Holmes Bannon. She was a lieutenant in the UNSC. Too strong of a heart to do the dirty work her father done, but still wanting to serve. She served. That's all he knew. He couldn't even know how she died. All that he knew was that she was lost to a Covenant glassing in a far-off colony.

She had died, fighting for Humanity, **because** she was Human.

These Spartans, they couldn't do that, and he was very much to blame.

Tears were in his eyes and Halsey had no care for it. Everyone who worked in this program dealt with this in some way. There were always going to be those who didn't have the will strong enough to go on.

"Is there anything else, or shall we part ways here? I'm very much busy planning for the second class of Spartans."

She was cold and desolate and… she deserved this war. "I will remember them. All of them."

Numbers. There were numbers on her datapad, reporting the successes of them all. The one she had attention to in particular: 117.

By God, the tragedy of it, it had made him falter where he stood as he remembered his young face. The fun he had with his friends, as a child, thinking nothing of the reality of life as it turned out. Peace was robbed of him.

His name was John. "I will remember him for who he was, and what he could've been."

Halsey was right. She was always right. Masterson would never live to see to what measure, but Halsey was right on a technicality and maybe, just maybe, if he were alive to see that would've been his sweet revenge.

**"This boy will save the galaxy. **You'll see**."**

The boy did save the galaxy. The boy did ignite a Halo to wipe out the Covenant. The boy did end the war. The boy did rise up more broken in his name and send Humanity down a path where its next step was fundamentally poisoned. The boy would follow orders to the very end as a machine.

But more than that however, that same boy would live to end the galaxy.


	27. 1-21: Well Who Am I to Keep You Down?

**A/N: NGL this chapter feels sloppy (write at 3am, no beta reading, final destination). Also no big reader response thing this chapter, because I may have something special planned for when I hit 1k favs on FFnet**

* * *

**1-21**

**Well Who am I to Keep you Down?**

* * *

Shepard had stood there in the well deck, looking at JD, two of the Normandy's monsters between them. And yet she looked through them.

The man had responded to a rank not his own, and far removed from when that would've been for him.

_Interesting._

"Carry on." She said with her command, and she turned away, back into the elevator, raising herself up, leaving behind the bloody and the unknown.

JD had been frozen solid about, a mistake written in his face as he had shared a grim look with Mai, only to return to behind the Mako and bide his time.

Tali, Liara, Garrus, they had been frozen solid that entire time. Only at the very end, after all had been said and done and they had been safe to move, had Liara reached her hand up and realized droplets of blood from the fight had gotten on her face. She looked, and stared, at the deep human blood on her fingers, and realized that day that even machines could bleed.

* * *

They hadn't even stopped their own bleeding as the mats were put asides, the floor rubbed down by them. To see Mai and Wrex on their knees, washing the floor of themselves with rags, it was a sight to behold that day. A day of sights upon sights.

Metal on fabric, wet fabric, it was like a violin string, pulled against by a bow for an uncomfortable amount of time. Hitman, in the shadows, finally emerged to bear witness.

"Good fight."

"Mm." Mai rattled to Wrex quietly. He had been smiling with his skewed face. What an odd look.

It was a good fight. She felt it had been. Should she be smiling as well?

They had still been bleeding, separately, but it was no matter. They had picked themselves up, on their knees, cleaning as they were told.

"Hitman?" Emerson had quietly called for his Marines, and they answered. "Let's uh, let's give the lady a little help."

Mai had stopped her scrubbing, her head locked up with Emerson's. He froze. "No. Commander's orders."

"It's-" Emerson stumbled. "It would be more expedient for us to at least try-"

"No, sergeant." Mai had rattled out, and that was that. Even in something as diminutive as scrubbing the deck, she would take it, as far as she could, alone. That was how she worked best. The soapy water and the cleaning alcohol had burned wounds, her senses ablaze with the burn, but she had stayed absolutely silent as the sponges and rags turned red and they were discarded into a bucket meant for the Mako's oil.

Wrex hadn't been the one to get Mai onto her knees in submission.

Shepard had been. More than that she had made both of them.

Soldiers followed orders.

* * *

**"Don't take her, please, she's my daughter! Take me instead!"**

A nightmare that echoed. Shepard's dreams were of her failures and of the Protheans. Of Reaping and a metal apocalypse. This she knew. But there was something else there now. Something just beyond the waters of her mind that was cast off. The only thing that remained had been the pleading she had to repeat on her own lips in her mind.

Riding up the elevator, Shepard had known of that horror: the mother's plight, and it echoed in her like a bell, from heart to head to-

Shepard had clutched her stomach, a wince of pain. She was good at beating them down, but shrapnel from that last grenade had opened some tears long faded away. Chakwas had reached out to help, but Shepard shook her head.

"It's fine, Doc. It's just, the leftovers from… a long time ago." Chakwas understood. She was the only one of the Normandy to know what Shepard spoke about. Even she as a Doctor hadn't felt, personally, what Shepard had gone through. "I should go."

With that Shepard had bid Chakwas good day as she felt her midsection numb out and she continued upstairs into comms. The crew had been pale, having seen that fight below.

_"She fought him to a standstill! What the fuck?"_

_"I thought- I didn't think she was worth squat outside of her armor but…"_

_"I've served for twenty years and I've never seen _ _ **anything ** _ _like that."_

Whispers and conversation of a fight that moved mountains. It only fueled Shepard as she made her way into the comms room and spoke her clearance codes.

The way Mai fought, just by her own standards, it was beyond anything she had ever seen in that universe. It was like watching the physical manifestation of force fight. It was a fight that had no reason to be fought, and no reason to be survived, and yet Mai and Wrex were still ready to go.

She herself was an N7. It would be ignorant of her to not admit that she herself had been one of Humanity's best fighters. It was that level she operated on and what Humanity called of her. Though what she saw, that was something else entirely. The pure capability that Mai had yet to shown was hinted that very day, and it made Shepard look for the truth.

The comm room was sealed, the ship's VI denoted that everything that was to be said and discussed in it was classified.

"Computer. Put me through to the Kilimanjaro, and request Admiral Hackett."

It didn't take long. The Normandy had been a few days out and due to rendezvous with the Kilimanjaro and its battlegroup over Altis anyway, however Shepard had meant to ask something else now instead of her usual check up with the brass. She had been a favorite, and the ire, of the Admiralty. As much of a figure as she was anyone who disagreed with her had been always held to a certain type of scrutiny.

Admiral Hackett had been one of Shepard's greatest advocated amongst the Admiralty.

"Commander Shepard." Hackett's hologram had come to life, and he had been, as she had always known him to be, in his blue uniform. "You requested comms with me?"

Shepard had nodded. She wasn't exactly in the appropriate dress to address the Alliance's chief naval admiral, however she existed both inside and outside of the Alliance. Though again there was no formality to be had with what she was going to ask.

"Admiral. I have an inquiry that, if it goes above Captain Anderson's head, must land at your feet."

The great secrets of the Alliance had come in two parts:

The first had been the true nature of the Covenant; kept because, if their genocidal secret was revealed, the Council would press down on them with a scrutiny that would quash any benefit that might've come from Alliance and Covenant cooperation.

The second had been of two people.

A Spartan, and an ODST.

Shepard had her way with secrets. The first one she ever looked over, the one that had made her acquainted with Cerberus, started out very much like this: a phone call.

Hackett had hoped he was going to get warning, that Shepard would've gone through more people, but she always aimed high. He had adjusted himself in his quarters, standing on his own comm unit, getting ready for the storm.

"Well, Commander, go ahead."

"I have on my crew two Naval liaisons. Special forces. A Master Chief Petty Officer Mai Gul, and a Master Chief Petty Officer Jon Durante. Not from my program." There it was, out in the open. Hackett's face had become stone. "They're good soldiers. Some of the best." Hackett's expression lightened; Shepard noticed. "However, they're not predisposed to speak of themselves."

There was a silence as Hackett nodded. He thought he had time.

"Is there an issue with this, Commander?"

Shepard tightened her jaw, nodding. "This mission. It's like nothing we've done before. And it's because of me. The men and women onboard this ship deserve something a little more… Human, than what is usually called for in this service. I want to know them. To let them know that I will take care of them."

Of course, the Admiralty was keeping track of her. Officers and admirals reached out to her for years to see if she could help. Almost every single one had their prayers answered.

"You know, one day Shepard, you're gonna be in charge of a cruiser, or a dreadnaught, and you're gonna have to realize you can't touch base with every single one of the crew like you do. I've read your reports, and, by God, you really try to know them."

Harris had been an up and coming star in the Urban Combat Championship leagues, he had dropped instead to fight for Humanity amongst the stars with his machine gun.

Bannon had been running from her third marriage.

Loke and Tali were becoming fast friends. Cut from the same cloth perhaps if their casual conversations were anything to go by: very similar, that is. If anything, Tali preferred to spar with Loke, and the Marine had agreed.

Emerson had been always shooting for the top, but falling just short. Not because he couldn't make it, but because he realized it would put him next to the likes of herself or Ryder. He, more than anyone, knew what the galaxy did to people like them.

Forty-five crew members.

Forty-five people she knew.

Forty-three stories down.

It was those two remaining that were glaring at her.

"I have that chance now Admiral. So I'm going to do it."

"Hm. And what do you know of them now?"

JD was a smoker, grew up on Earth, like her. West Virginia. Tried to save as many lives as he could as an SOF operator in his profession. He was quiet. A man of action. He slept a lot. Used a language moved to antiquity by the rise of VIs and computing technology. Was part of some sort of special program along with-

Mai Gul. Orphan. Spaceborne. She didn't know sign language; that's why she was being taught. Quiet as well, said nothing more than what she needed to. Complained about nothing, did everything that was asked of her. She was not a personality. She was an asset in the highest sense, and Shepard hadn't realized that someone like that could exist beneath her brutality.

Shepard didn't want to define her by attachment to someone else, and yet, that was a part of her two master chiefs.

Mai had, she had dared to use the word, cared for JD deeply. That was her perception of them.

How did she know that? For all of Mai's omniscience on the battlefield, for how she operated, she only regarded two constraints, two considerations in how she did. They were not forced upon her, could not be forced upon her, they were her choice: The constraint of orders, and then JD. She always kept the man in her regard.

Shepard had told Hackett all of this, and yet it wasn't enough. "I know what it's like to be underneath black ink, Admiral. And yet… they seem oppressed of themselves… I don't remember ever coming across classified info that went down to who those people were."

"In their case, Commander, it's needed."

"But why?" Shepard had been short of a snap at Hackett. "I know what mission I'm on, Admiral. But what about them?"

"Their tasking is to support you."

Shepard had followed up so fast, she betrayed herself. "Then what's so special about them?"

Hackett sucked in some breath. "Commander. There are people in this life you will never truly understand. Chief Gul and Chief Durante are of that nature for a reason. They are assets. You have understand the pure tactical and political nature of their existence confides in them that, and they know it as well."

_Political?_

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. She had stared down admirals before, stared down entire battlefields. She knew who she was now.

"Admiral, respectfully. I have to invoke my status as a Spectre in regards to Chief Gul and Chief Durante. I deserve to know who my crew are, and I expect a full brief when I arrive on Altis."

Shepard had almost been sure the hologram had frozen as she sucked in her chest to say that. Hackett's eyes widened, silent. It was a silent unbecoming of him, and yet, one that Shepard knew all too well. She had hit a strain. People always assumed the shape of her, her role in their lives. That went all the way to Hackett.

"Is that your decision, Commander Shepard?"

She had killed those that the world might've thought as innocent. Her resolve, her dare, had been that much. She knew how low she could go and come out. "Yes, sir."

Hackett looked down at his feet as he nodded. "Very well."

There was only but one question, one command, one thought in her mind that she would never ask. Everything else was free game to her.

"Is that all, Commander?"

Her stomach was tight in pain, but she knew how to deal with it as she saluted the Admiral. "I should go."

And she did, bowing out, returning to her quarters that day, a little side quest in her mind put there: _What's so special about the Chiefs?_

Staring up at the ceiling, she had run her thumbs over her knuckles, and thought of the secrets that surrounded her.

* * *

Mai had been black and blue all over, a handful of days after. Wrex's face had been bent askew but he hadn't minded, even as his jaw seemed a bit looser than usual.

"Ghoul."

"Wrex."

Was the only thing that the two had said to each other since that fight, the limping they had all walked with now shared. He had kept up his part of the deal and not relented his information which he saw witness too, but, more than enough, JD had spilled some sort of the beans anyway. He was quieter now, in the days since, avoiding eye contact with Shepard as she did her rounds.

_"Are you okay, Master Chief?" Shepard had asked JD directly, having caught him eating lunch on the crew deck with Chakwas, comparing battlefield medicine notes._

_"Yes ma'am." Was all he answered._

Wrex and Mai had been the ones to perform aid on each other. All very rudimentary stuff: The way Mai had picked out pieces of his scales she had punched into him, or the way that Wrex stitched her leg shut. Respect. There was respect to each other. Not one of earned respect, not one of honor, but that of knowledge. Mai had been humbled, at the very least. It was the worst a fight had gone for her in years. Perhaps in a real battlefield thing would've been different, but this was the closest they would've probably gotten.

Not like it mattered.

Chief Adams had stood over the two as they held magnetic grips. "You two, I'm gonna need official metrics on your punches, because what the hell."

Wrex and Mai had taken many punches to the floor in the fight, dents in each place they landed had remained, only to be popped back out by a magnet converted by Tali.

"Classified." Mai had rattled out as they finished up. She still hadn't been in her techsuit, now just in her duty uniform.

Without it, she seemed different. The appearance of her, without the trappings of her armor, her suits, this was the most Human she had been in a while.

All JD could do was watch from afar, losing himself in his memory leaning against the Mako.

He admired the Spartans, long ago. It was a rumor that many of the best ODSTs became Spartans. Now he knew that had been a lie, put down the wire like so many battlefield stories, but back then, and still in some fashion, he admired the champions of Humanity in the war.

If he could die so one of them could live on, to survive, to win the war, he wouldn't have minded.

If he could die for Mai-

"Are you okay, JD?"

With a face, bruised to all hell, and one eye of hers nearly buried by the enflamed, purple flesh of a black eye, she had been the one asking that. She was finished, and Wrex had retired to his dark corner of the well deck. They hadn't talked so directly since the fight.

Another ship boarding, this time less lethal, another stop on a planet for the Normandy to discharge. The busy missions that Shepard had amused them with; promising they were all going toward the fight with Saren. The regular and routine had taken people's minds off a lot of the peculiarities of serving on the Normandy on the way to Altis.

JD had straightened his mouth, and that was all Mai needed. He was fine. (Better now that she had asked.)

He shook his head. "Better than you. Don't worry about me."

"JD." She said again.

He looked at her.

Mai had looked so different, battered and hurt.

The image of Mai in his mind had been revealed, the one that he had taken without his own conscious knowledge:

Her lips were always curled upward, almost as if pouting. A mean resting bitch face if he had ever known one, and perhaps part of the Spartan curriculum. It was no wonder it had taken him this long to reckon he had been able to look at her and not look away. She had an oblong face, and her hair, now grown out in its darkest black, chocolate hues, framed it neatly on both sides. She was unused to having it that long, a rather poor ponytail made by her in the back, a rubber band holding it all together. Thinner eyebrows always seeming to curved down made her eyes only so much fiercer.

That was the very first organic thing he had ever seen of her: her eyes. Electric blue. The blue that burned. It hadn't been natural; he knew that at least.

"JD?" She caught him looking at her. Did she really look that bad?

"Oh uh. Nothing." He scrambled. "Don't want to put Shepard off of us, is all. Sorry." He apologized, clumsily.

"Mm." She let slip from her throat. She wasn't disappointed. Not in him. She knew indoctrination and to be addressed was something that went bone deep. She went up, tracing the blackened oval around her eye. "If… anything, I would be the one doing it… Can I have…?"

She didn't need to finish. Up from his collar: her necklace. She almost jumped at him with her hands to seize it back, but she settled herself, letting JD take it off and, gingerly, place it back into her hands.

"Thank you."

"Of course."

They stood there, in front of each other, moments passing by, ease and calm.

Mai had very rarely ever felt the grain of her necklace, not with her fingers, her pads. It felt warm, it felt familiar. It felt like it was hers.

_How do I know that?_

Spartans were assets, property. Nothing belonged to them. They belonged to the UNSC; to their masters.

"Hey uh… Been a hot minute." JD sputtered out, and he had shifted to move, back behind the Mako, to her cot and their lockers, away from view. He didn't need to say anything else; she knew. It was as natural as it came at this point.

She looked so different, without the skin of a Spartan. Sliding her necklace back into her neckline JD had looked away. It was hard to feel anything particularly carnal when it came to Mai. He was a red-blooded male, same as most ODSTs. A few, choice encounters asides, he had preferred the female form as much as anyone. Though Mai, her figure was still different. He had seen her naked within the first days of meeting her (and many times after that). The scars, it marked her as much as it marked his memory. The herculean visage of her was all covered with scar tissue and muscles which screamed at him as unnatural. To think of anything deeper, it was impossible.

She was a Spartan, and all that that had meant.

She slid down onto her cot, sitting, as JD pulled up a crate.

Eye level. A rarity, and something she allowed with him.

"Are you okay, Mai?" JD had pressed the question back on her earnestly. Mai didn't know how to answer, opening her mouth, a slightly puffed lip biting into her teeth as she decided to simply look at her own biometrics with her omni.

"I am condition green." She decided. "I am… okay." She parroted.

She did not look like it at all, and yet she was. What a privilege, what a horror.

JD had only remembered that there had been an idea, put forth over the wire: Spartans never died. Back then he knew himself it was some sort of morale boosting propaganda, and yet, seeing Mai, here, now, he wondered if it was true. He wondered what really could kill a Spartan.

The silence between them was always comforting. Many times, JD would be obliged to nap, to fall asleep in her presence. That was her safety that she provided, however there was a tension in the air and they both felt it. Things they needed to talk about, futures they needed to face. So many things and they weren't the best at it.

It was a surprise to even herself that Mai stepped first in talking. It had been on her mind since she had first seen JD gun down a Human.

"Have you gotten used to it? JD?"

"Hm?"

"Killi-" Mai stopped herself. "Fighting, other humans."

A few away missions already JD would have to take down other humans. In the heat of battle, of course he was fine. But it was the after: seeing their bodies, knowing that he had been the one to put them in the ground. Mercenaries, pirates, all sorts of unsavory types. Manpower during the war with the Covenant was always so emphasized. Survival to fight another day, except in the most extreme cases, was emphasized. Humanity could only speed up so many generations to die, and even he, at 26 years old, was old. To kill other humans felt so wrong to him for the wrong reasons: in regards to the war they left. He didn't even want to confront the other part of it; the moral part of it.

"I wish I didn't know that it's… the same as killing Covenant."

Mai had nodded urgently. So he did understand. "I don't like it. I never did." She spoke. So many dead from Feros. All from her. Headshots, like clockwork. She didn't like it, but she was good at it. More than good. Perfection in her craft. Not an ounce of irony in her voice.

"It was Humanity's normal once, wasn't it?" He mused, head hung back, looking at a now familiar ceiling. "Killing each other..."

He wanted a smoke, he really did, but he couldn't bring himself to.

"Normal." Mai said so quietly, she reached up, feeling a bang of her black hair, disparaging its length, trying to distract herself. "What is a normal life for you, JD?"

_Oh. _JD's head moved forward, looking at her in earnest as opposed to leaning on cold steel. "Why do you ask?"

"I would like to know." She said promptly.

To know what JD wanted. To know what a normal life was. To know what she could not.

She said it so softly, it was unlike her.

What was a normal life?

"It's an apartment for me." JD started like that at least. "Not on a planet. I'm uh, not really used to planetside. It's also uh… coffee. Every morning. Just because I want it. Not because I need it."

It's a bed that could fit him four times over. It's sheets like the ones he gave Mai. It's a kitchen and homecooked meals. A fridge with his mother's cooking. Neighbors that didn't mourn for lost family. A war that never was. It's cigarettes, over the balcony, looking up at the stars. Quiet days where he didn't have to worry about his gear. Reading. Maybe reading. Weeks where he didn't need to open his mouth except to maybe say hello to his mailman.

Maybe it's teaching more people about ASL. As a hobby? Perhaps.

Vacations somedays to when he did want to go meet real dirt, and real air, see blue sky above where he didn't drop out of.

A partner. To share it with.

Friends.

A place in the world where no one would bother him.

Mai had sat quietly, listening to him get lost in thoughts he didn't know he verbalized. JD was quiet. And she liked that. Marines that acted, not talked, were always her preference. But JD's silence was more to her. He didn't need to speak to communicate to her, and yet… speech was not lost from him. He spoke to her because she would listen.

She listened, and she didn't understand.

"A normal life, Mai. What is it for you?"

A war that would never end. Where she fought against Humanity's enemies to the very end. A place where her death meant something.

That was her normal.

"There will be Covenant on Altis." A fact two of them had to heavily contend with. "My normal is **to kill them all**."

"I know." JD had looked away from her. It wasn't an I know of empathy; it was pure understanding. It had been _his _normal once too. Mai understood this. "They're different now."

"That's not true." Her intensity rose, like an accusation, electric blue eyes burning into JD.

"It has to be." He squinted away, to the floor, to a pile of ash from a cigarette he'd yet to dust away.

"How do you know that." She asked with such expectation, such harm promised.

He did have an answer though. It was clear as day. "It's because _we _are different now."

It was an uncomfortable truth in both their minds. They were not the people they would be if they stayed in their universe. Was that right?

Mai thought about it, and the most glaring change she knew had been of JD, and even her. As grating as she was to accept by order and by courtesy forced upon her: they were acquaintances with aliens. For JD, it was more.

"How'd you do it?" She ground through her teeth.

"Hm?" JD saw the edge.

"With… Garrus and Tali. You became familiar of them very easily." She stopped herself before admitting. "Friendly."

Tali was present today, having just come back from an away mission where the Geth were present. She was giddy, holding her hands up to her chest as she and Loke spoke about something or another, their forms bouncing in a shared laugh as Tali was among company with Hitman. Garrus was catching some shut eye for his own break. He had been helping Hitman attend to their weapons, albeit after having spent a late-night last night with JD. They spoke of their fathers and their mothers, of the big case that almost split their unions and the pain imparted on them as children.

"It helps that they're… not humanoid," JD started, not knowing where to start. "I mean, I guess Tali is but you know what I mean." Mai stared at him with a blank face. She didn't. "Tali was very easy. She's friendly, she's spunky. She reminds me of, I dunno, the nerdy girl back in high school. We're friends. I can be friends with her. She's, they're-, they're not like totally different from us."

"I don't know what you mean, JD." Mai had put so much stone, almost aggravation in her voice that JD paused, trying to impart knowledge from a base she never had.

He found something though. Something he thought privately when he and Garrus spoke to each other at night so naturally. "Tali could be Human. Liara could be Human. Garrus could be Human. Imagine if they weren't their races. Imagine if they were… me. My body."

Mai tilted her head, "But they aren't Human."

What did it mean to be Human?

It was a question far beyond him to answer, and yet Mai needed to know. "It's just something you know, Mai. It's something I don't think-"

"I wouldn't know?"

JD cringed, but it was the truth. She never grew up. She never became Human. She was made.

He couldn't move, couldn't nod or affirm, because he didn't want that shame of confirming still, after so long. He could talk though.

"For Garrus:" He looked at his table where he often kept to himself. He was on the Marine side of the Well Deck, but he weathered it well. He was as strong and as acclimated as they came and JD had been thankful it had been him there, to be a Turian and be in Shepard's crew. "I understand him. He knows what it was like to grow up like I did. We share something, and that is so affirming. I call it Human, but it's a common experience that we have. That we share."

Share. That word. It stung on Mai's mind.

"But what about us?" It was heavy in impropriety, quiet and barely said with her voice, coming from within her. "What do we share JD?"

It was a horrible question. One that spoke to a question beyond who they were as individuals. It was a question of Spartanhood.

They didn't even share the same blood and bones.

No answer came from JD.

He opened his mouth, raised his hands to sign, but nothing could come, nothing could be said, or signed. Because there was no answer they could find easily. The only thing they shared overtly was a definition so common: They were Human.

They knew, and for perhaps one of the first times in her life, Mai knew tragedy in her heart.

His mother, JD remembered his mother, unable to sign her way to her son's heart in moments where he needed it. He reached out to Mai's hand, slowly, looking away, and touched upon it, sitting in a fist on her knee. She had unfurled it by reaction, feeling skin on skin contact she had not felt in years. Nothing in her years of training and combat experience made her know what to do as JD slid his own hand, for a moment, into her palm, thumb moving across the back, holding her. Somehow their hands had been the same size, JD had recalled immediately as he became conscious of what he was doing. Emulating his mother, his right hand was in her own right hand. He hadn't clasped it entirely, but instead gotten deep enough to simply apply pressure, running his thumb across her knuckles once, twice, three times before drawing away.

She liked doing that: rubbing her knuckles when she was anxious.

Mai had held her breath the entire time, beating back the urge to squeeze back. It was the fear of breaking his hand. JD saw no danger however as he had drawn back, looked at her again, and breathed out as if nothing had happened.

The warmth of his hand, his fingers, were ghosted now on her own palm, and she curled it up toward her, looking with her eyes for this magic he left. It wasn't the same as fighting people, the feel of flesh as she ripped and teared. It was certainly not like Wrex. This was JD touching her. Skin on skin.

Starved.

The word in her mind for what she felt.

**Touch starved.**

JD had made a fist over his chest, almost as if mirroring what she had been doing, but had moved it in a cycle twice.

I'M SORRY.

Sorry for not knowing, for not feeling, as you do. That's what he hoped was imparted.

If it was, Mai didn't need it. Not from him, of all people. There were things she would never understand about people, but she could understand JD, and that was enough for now.

"JD. Would you like to practice?"

She had, with a face, broken and bruised, had looked at him with a comfortableness. A comfortableness that broke his heart. Despite the hurt, she tried. She tried to smile, and in trying, she did for him.

Mai had _wanted _to try. For him. She always did, no matter what he had presented her with.

He had never seen her smile before.

"I'd like that, Mai. I'd like that." He nodded to himself, and she had settled in front of him on her cot as she always did. "Let's work on declaratives…"

* * *

"Well well well," The alluring Asari had looked him up and down as her Batarian guard did a sweep with his omni of them. It wouldn't matter. The weapons they had wouldn't register as them. "Who knew that something called the Covenant would have its heretics."

Kaal Roth had chittered a bit, hearing that word she used. He knew religion. He had been to High Charity, he had taken part in the holy sermons and seen the divine machines of the Forerunners. He was impressed then, but the Gods of his galaxy were not here.

The Demons had come, sure, but he knew what Demons lay in wait to be discovered. He knew, and he was spared. He called that, as he had flown from Virmire, a testament to faith.

With the Covenant, he had never met the gods, the Forerunners.

Here had very much met God, and it had made him a believer. Not a follower however.

Aria T'Loak had been the figure of worship here on that rock and he stood before her.

A former mining station, now turned into a city in the stars. The Humans knew it as Omega. Kaal preferred the Krogan translation: land of opportunity.

It wasn't the first time in that last week he had stood before something of worship. In that electronically loud bar, its patrons nonethewiser to those above them, Kaal Roth made his case.

"There's a saying that a Human had. I don't know if he existed here," he started, arms crossed and shield projector faced out toward her Batarian guard. It hadn't been activated, but it was better safe than sorry. "Money degrades all gods, and turns them into commodities. I know what I'll pray to."

Her guards had been more focused on the two Hunters that had been his main show of force, the squad of Jackals that had also come came with weapons that the galaxy had barely seen yet. It was a thing of magic that kinetic barriers had been so cheap, easily extracted from the Quarians they stole the ship from. They hadn't been harder to kill in their entire lives.

Harder to kill enough that they had come to this bar, where they were pointed to, and went head on with who was in charge. That was the lease on life that Kaal and his band of "heretics" felt. If they went back to Altis, they would've been labeled as such by straying from the path.

That path led them to an Asari, drenched in a darkness that was not of color, but of being. The neon lights of this club did nothing to illuminate her.

A lot of leather on her. Kaal wonder how much it costed. "I'm entertaining you tonight because, obviously, you're new here. Newer here than anyone who has ever stepped foot on Omega. That doesn't buy you long however. Speak."

"Right to business. I like that." He flared his omni. "I'm looking for a place to bring more like me over. The way this galaxy is going, I feel like we're going to need it."

Aria had been indifferent, crossing her legs as she looked over her shoulder at the Asari dancers in their cages. "We see a lot of Quarian ships out here, nowadays. They're probing the Veil, trying to gauge the Geth. We keep track of them, so, let me just say that your approach vector into this system was… interesting."

"Is it now?" Kaal had tipped his head up. Aria had offered him a seat on that elongated couch, reaching to the side of the lounge. He obliged. "These Mass Effect drives are often a limiting factor. We're not used to them."

"Oh don't play coy. I've got a dozen Spectres around my finger and the picture that's been painted for me says you're in the background. Are you?"

He stood before God, and all that it asked of him was who he had been, and where he came from. He gave it, and it let him go. "It wouldn't be good for my life expectancy if I was."

"Hmph… You know the galaxy has a bounty on Saren. If you knew where he was, you might be obliged to call it in."

"I have no idea who that is." Kaal spoke with as much brevity he could muster. Not that it was the truth, but because he had to say it. He did not know Saren, because if he did, he was about to be so much more important than he could handle. Jackals like him weren't meant for that.

Aria was reflective, the color of red bouncing off the smooth skin of her face, her lip gloss, like shimmering glass. She looked off and away into her club, reminiscing. "Saren. I know him. As a younger Spectre he found his place among this part of the galaxy, killing so, so many. Sometimes for me, sometimes against my interests, but he was never someone to be trifled with. If he didn't mess with you… that means something. And if you screwed him over, well, it wouldn't be in my benefit to harbor you, if that's what you're looking for."

"We're all dead eventually." Kaal sneered. "And in any case, we're not hiding from no one. Jackals like me, we know when to fight, when to deal."

"Oh my. So much spunk for someone who is barely cunt level with me." Each word from her was a confusing cloak of Asari seduction and cold-blooded ruthlessness. "Tell me about the Jackals then."

Kaal adjusted some of his whiskers. "We're a pragmatic people. Put a price tag on it, and that's how we'll decide whether or not we do something. It's built into our bones."

"Including breaking off from the Covenant?"

Kaal had picked at some of his talons, glancing at the Hunters that came with him. They were like statues. "Not the first time. And the Covenant isn't what it used to be. At least here."

Skeptical. Then again Aria had always been skeptical. Anyone who lived as long as her had been. "Right, right… interdimensional refugees you all are. And you're fine settling right back into merc work?"

"If you've got the right price… and this place, Omega, it feels right."

It was like a mirror image of High Charity, painted a different scheme. Not the holy city, but rather unholy. He had checked the translation in his omni tool. For his people, it had translated as the virgin seas.

"You're soldiers?"

Kaal's shield was very well used, he flashing his emitter, chromed and shiny. "Humanity put up a fight."

"Humanity?"

"Not yours."

"Oh."

"Maybe you'll know one day, but hey, many of my men, they're veterans, same as me. We've burned planets."

Veterans were a dime a dozen on Omega, especially those of the persuasion of Kaal and his band, however those veterans, inversely, were not Kaal and his band. Just the two _Hunters _as she was told, they were like none she had ever seen. They were not individuals, they were weapons. She had heard of what happened on Altis, and seen what kind of fighting had happened. Alliance forces were beat to a pulp before communications were normalized. No one knew or would understand how these Covenant-types would fight in a one to one fight, however Aria was a betting woman, thinking about her domain.

"The lower decks. That's… let's just say my grasp around it isn't as tight as it is here. I've been meaning to reaffirm, and, well, what better way to remind people what station there are by the presence of a new outpost manned by some enforcers."

Staking a claim. "Does sound like an idea."

They spoke a frank language, they understood each other by the basis of power and territory. She waved a hand up, giving an order. "You're on your own on how you do it, but whatever you do, it's in my name. Remember that."

That was that. He got what he needed. Kaal had hopped off the couch, rallying his Jackals down in the bar and the Hunters with a ping on their omnis. "Of course. I'll always remember who cuts me my check."

"Hm?" Aria cocked her head. It wasn't through the translator.

"A Human expression. I learned their language before I ever came to this galaxy."

"Well, just make sure you learn mine."

"Of course, what're the fundamentals?"

"There's just one rule. It's really easy to follow if you're smart."

"And what would that be?"

Omega was her holy place. She was its empress. "Don't **fuck **with Aria."

For as much of a smirk as he could put on, Kaal had done so. "Everyone else free game then?"

Aria returned it.

* * *

He woke up as men of action sometimes do: With a kick to his side.

JD's eyes flew open as a pained sound erupted from his throat in a burst, he turning over immediately to Garrus simply at his console apathetic in watching Emerson a little roughly toe tap the man's ribs. To be fair he was used to getting waken up like this. He had dozed off by the Mako's service console, having been lulled to Garrus's typing on the Mako's diagnostics panel. _("They've gotta name this thing after me at some point JD.")_

The dimmed lights, the fact that none of the usual deck crew was around… It was the night cycle on the Normandy. Behind him through the Mako he could faintly hear Mai's breathing. She was sleeping.

The shock trooper looked up to an almost plain clothed Emerson, just a simple undershirt that the Marines often wore beneath their BDU. To be fair he was wearing the same. Away missions with Shepard had been scarce for the full Marine team. No need to bring out the full guns when a small fireteam could suffice. Still many volunteered if they could. JD felt it. No one wanted to be in the well deck too long, ever since the fight.

A spare locker had been turned over on the floor by the Marine's side, used as a table as a circle of half a dozen men and women surrounded it. "Black jack. Interested?" Emerson posed, then even looking over to Garrus. "You too, Vakarian."

Garrus had looked at his running calibrations for the Mako's main gun. Whoever the Alliance tech was that was in charge of factory testing was certainly slacking. "What's the pot?"

"Credits. Shore leave shit. Same as usual. You two in?"

"What's black jack?" Garrus asked, deadpanned, half still busy with the diagnostics.

"A way for me to steal money from my men fair and square." Emerson said frankly.

JD and Garrus had shared a gaze, and a nod. Why not.

Emerson pocketed his hands after offering a grip down to JD. He had taken it, rising him up as the last two players were drawn away to Hitman's corner of the well deck. "We're due for a place called Noveria. Corporate colony. Rather boring if you ask me, but chances are there's some real luxury shit over there."

It was still odd for JD, traveling on a starship without the pretense of going to war. The galaxy was, relatively, at peace. There was conflict, yes, but there was no frontline, no overbearing presence of an enemy. He was simply traveling, on a journey, bagging goons beneath moons.

Hitman's corner, musty as usual, but for JD that was par for the course. He himself probably didn't smell any better. The sonic fresheners of the sleeper pods could only do so much. Even UNSC ships had showers. But that was the peculiarities of the Normandy. He had no reference for standard ships of the line.

It was a Marine's corner, truly. Out of reg accommodations, out of reg people, but Shepard was a Marine herself, she let it fly for the sake of late-night casualness.

"Durante." Bannon had been there, toothbrush in her mouth as she spat in a water bottle.

"JD is fine."

"Whatever you say spook." Harris had been there. No chair could be there as they sat in a school circle. A full table tonight. Ten now. Seating was provided even for Garrus and JD though, as abrasive as Hitman was.

A weapon locker was shared between Garrus and JD for seating.

"Here's my big idea." Annel had been in the middle of a conversation as she continued speaking after greeting the shock trooper and the Turian. "We go back to using bullets. Powder and casings and shit." She gestured back to Shepard's sniper rifle above Hitman's lockers, hoisted for decoration the same as her bear rug in the crew deck.

It had a name now: Bear.

It took several weeks for that one.

Emerson had cleared his nose, going into his pack and drawing the cards for tonight, thinking about it. "Go medieval on their asses?"

"Well yeah. They won't expect it. I mean, I think Wrex's shotgun uses shells or something. Our armor? Our barriers? They're over tuned for standard issue. Something slow and big like, I dunno, a fifty cal? Is that big?"

The M6 SOCOM pistol, JD had known it was a 12.7 cartridge. Fifty caliber by an American metric. Depending on the bullet itself it could cut right through even Elite armor and out the other side. Collateral damage had necessitated standard issue ammunition to be APHE: Armor-piercing, high explosive. He had seen enough Grunt heads pop with it.

Bannon interjected. "Remember Altis? The Covenant? Their weapons were mostly energy based. Some hard projectiles. Can hardly remember seeing barriers melt like that."

That's right. JD had been suddenly, intimately aware. Hitman, with Ryder, had been on the ground on Altis. They had fought the Covenant.

Maybe they weren't so bad.

"Just a matter of tuning." Emerson spoke. "We should be getting readouts on Covenant weapon metrics soon. I don't know how we couldn't have that info now, seeing as they're squatting on Altis."

"What's your take on the Covenant?" JD spoke out loud. He couldn't bear it any longer, hands clasped between his legs as he sat. "Honest."

Nutt, a demolitions expert with Hitman, had rolled his bearded face around once, considering. A teacher from Earth once. The most educated. "I'm not quite sure how we're supposed to feel about a transdimensional union of aliens. A religious sect at that."

"Well that and they shot at us." Harris recalled.

"Yeah," Nutt relented, patting down some grenades still attached to his duty belt. "I'm no fuckin' liberal pansy like Lieutenant Alenko, bless his optimism about other races, and no offense Vakarian, but no group fights like they did without having been in the shit at some point."

"Their documents did say that they were in a protracted war against heretics." Emerson pointed out.

The information packet sent from the Covenant had been as much of a beautiful farse to JD and Mai as anything, and yet, it revealed so much. Biological profiles, typical appearances, naming conventions and cultural notes, along with operation of Covenant society, it was a great reference to truly understand what the Covenant was that the two UNSC soldiers didn't exactly know how to process. They didn't know what to do with the fact that Engineers, Huragok in proper terms, were a race of biological super computers. They didn't know what to do with what a female Sangheili looked like or the organization of the Jiralhanae clans.

More than that, they didn't know what to do with the explanation of the Forerunners.

All around Hitman, the reception to the Covenant had been, at best, just as their feelings to JD and Mai. At worst, just more Batarians or Krogan.

"I don't trust them. Not one bit. They shouldn't be on Altis." JD had finally let spit. "We should've bombed them out."

Garrus to his side had seen JD avoid his gaze, looking at his hands. His mandibles had flicked, once or twice. He knew that tone. Knew that tone from Humans who believed in a certain kind of supremacy. It was hatred, run deep.

Bannon cracked a smirk. "Well, well, there's something about the way you said that, Durante-"

"JD."

"JD… That scores you some points."

"Yeah?" JD tilted his head up to look at Bannon as she spoke, across the "table".

She held her cheek with a hand, callouses on her finger from trigger time. JD had the same. "It's the strong and silent types that you've gotta look out for. Now throw in."

"Now wait," Garrus raised his talon. "I still don't know how to play."

JD had huffed through his nose, tapping his elbow. "You've calibrated the Mako's gun five times already since dinner. You'll pick it up quick."

* * *

Garrus did pick it up quick.

"Let me get this straight, just so I know you Humans aren't taking it out on this poor Turian." About a half an hour in and a few rounds already blown through. "We get two cards from the dealer, one face up, one face down to keep the table guessing. Our goal is to get closest to 21, or get 21. If you go over you bust. On each go around we can ask for a card to get us closer."

"And I thought you Turians were hard to teach."

"Ah shut up Harris." Annel had been particularly sour after losing a hand herself on the draw, bringing her legs up to her chest as her curly red hair was let out momentarily, she running a hand through it. She was about down 500 credits. "I remember you gushing about Vakarian when he improved the Mako's shocks. God knows Shepard can't drive worth shit."

"Oh I'm blushing." Garrus's sardonic snark was always appreciated. "I need something to blush about when I'm down 1200." JD preferred black jack, which was why he himself was down a smooth 200. There was something else on Garrus's tongue, and this was much of an opportunity to jump on it. "You guys are rough with me. I know… but I have to ask. Is it because I'm a Turian, or just the ribbing?"

Hitman had tensed up, Emerson had tensed up, and that had meant something. JD knew Emerson at this point; pegged him for the type of Marine he was. The Marine who always completed the mission: a by the books badass. And yet even he had paused.

"Maybe at first. We, of all people, don't take to you Turians well, but that's just how it is around the Marines, I'm sure you understand."

"Hmph."

"But… God damn, Vakarian. You're more Human than some of us."

Where they sat had been where Mai and Wrex had fought days ago, and the marks were still there beneath their feet and in the air around them.

Garrus cleared his throat, agreeing when he inferred who he was compared to. "Chief Gul, she put up quite a fight… There's uh, something to be respected about it."

Everyone had tensed up, talking about Mai. As if she would be summoned by utterance or mention. She cast her shadow, and only by being near them, did JD know that there had been one. A frown on his face formed, but he couldn't afford to now. He needed a poker face.

"Mm. Here we go again."

Marco Favero was Hitman's engineer. Marco usually. Spaniard with all the slick looks of the best of hunks. Problem was he spoke with an Irish accent. "You're feckin' takin' us for a ride, Kay."

Kay was Emerson's nickname, his first name being Kristian. The K was special.

"Free to get off at any point." Emerson dealt out cards as usual, the flick of paper being put down soothing, if not sore at this point. Emerson was up about 3000.

King and a three. JD had looked over his cards. Sounds like a hit.

"Mm. Fuck this." Bannon had joined Annel's sourness, giving away her ghost. She wore her heart on her sleeve and out her mouth. Impulsive.

"Is that a give?" Garrus cocked his head. "I think it's a give."

Bannon growled. She was always very verbal. "Mm. You're lucky you've got a nice voice, Vakarian. Otherwise I'd tell you to shut up." She ground out. "Fold."

"It's the pleasing harmonics along with our translators. Don't take it like she wants to fuck you." Harris had tiredly said, big palm covering the bottom of his face as he looked at his cards. A seven showing.

Garrus could only make a point by just humming flatly. It was what JD imagined what an actual dog whistle sounded like, albeit not as painful, sitting right next to Garrus.

"Mmm. Think I'm wet." Nutt had been full of sarcasm, not too disturbed with his cards. Ace showing. "Keep doing it Vakarian."

Garrus shook his head as he looked as his cards, he dealt last. Ace showing as well. "My voice, my voice. Spirits, what is it about it."

"It fits your personality. Unlike JD." Emerson pointed out. "Hit?"

JD nodded. A card was flipped his way. Another three.

_Fuck._

He almost ignored the comment. "Huh?"

"Stand?"

"What? No. Hit."

Another card. Another three.

_What the hell._

"Stand… But what do you mean?"

Emerson had ignored JD as he went around, dealing cards, taking names. It was a massacre like whenever Hitman was on the ground.

"Hit." Harris had called.

"Your ass." Emerson breathed out, disappointed. Another Ace.

Two aces shown? Not good for Harris. "God damn. Hit." Ten. "You rig this shit every time."

"Not a cheater, Brian…. Vakarian, stand?"

Garrus had let slip the targeting apparatus on his head for a moment, looking at his hidden card with fresh eyes. "Hit me… With a card that is."

"Of course."

Jack. JD was out, and he had rolled his eyes.

"21. Read it and weep." Victory was in Garrus's voice. Prematurely showing.

"Nah uh uh." Emerson wagged a finger, flipping his cards. He had a queen showing himself. Heavy face card round. An ace himself was drawn and the entire "table" groaned. "21 as well. Push. This one didn't happen."

"What?" Garrus blinked not understanding.

Emerson explained. "Dealer gets a 21 along with someone else it nullifies the round. At least how we do it."

A mandible flared, annoyed. "You're cock sure you could."

"I count cards, Vakarian."

"Hmph."

"What do you mean, sergeant? My voice doesn't fit me?" JD returned to his subject, but Emerson hadn't explained. Bannon did. All of Hitman generally spoke for each other.

"You've gotta sorta whispy voice. Almost as if you're not putting enough air in each word. Yet you look like any regular operator, 'hun. Handsome and rugged, yet it looks like you've got a sensitive side." She winked at him, he grimaced back.

"Eh. I just don't think he's the type we expect to talk." Harris followed up. "Not really an insult, by the way. You just seem like, I dunno, the focused type."

"I bet he plays an instrument. Like some turbo nerd." A Hitman had called out, motioning back to what Garrus had warned him prior. It was from Feros. A would-be weapon from one of the colonist, seized instead. A guitar, dark wooded, properly strung. "I mean he does, you told us Vakarian."

JD and Garrus locked eyes. JD could only be a little annoyed.

"Yeah. I can."

"Got a story at least?" Nutt pressed on as he ran a hand through his beard, popping his omni to check a news article from the net in the downtime from playing. "Played off to your highschool sweetheart for prom? Your father taught you? Had an earworm one summer?"

"Nah. No. Self-taught… My mother. She would hold the guitar while I played. Good vibrations and all that. And well, if it made Mom happy, I'd do it."

Those words came easy. Like they did talking to Mai. It'd been a long time since he had said some of his story to Marines like him. Why tell when they'd be most likely dead in the month?

Old habits died hard, and Hitman, for all their grit toward them, were Human still.

"Play something, yeah?" Bannon had gotten up, seizing the guitar leaning on a locker, bringing it over. He cringed seeing her grab it by the neck, palm in the strings. "I used to be a singer. Did a Summer touring. I have quite a pair."

"A pair?" Garrus was confused. Tali had been going over the wonderful Human female trait of physical sexual features with him and her language had referred to the chest as "pairs".

"Lungs, Vakarians. I got jack shit for tits. Harris has a bigger cup size than me."

"Fuck off."

"Now can you play?" Bannon made her way to JD, offering, basically pushing the guitar into his lap. Something in his body had made it so the old synapses fired, and he held it like he had known to as a kid. The last time he had seen his guitar was the last day he had been on Luna, over half a decade ago.

Holding the laminated wood, he had felt closer to home than he had in a long time. Garrus shifted off, giving JD room for the neck.

"I uh, I ain't got a pick. I don't do fingerstyle." He answered, trying to weasel his way out. He never could in anything he did.

The distinctive sound of a pistol being vented was heard. Nutt had reached for his gun while no one was looking, pulling back the mechanism, reaching into what was the mini-rail gun's equivalent of its chamber. There, a shard of metal. Thin as paper almost. Deadly as a bullet however. Gun shot wounds were so clean in this universe JD could only be morbidly impressed. "Marco?" Nutt called out.

"Yep." The engineer had popped his omni, a mini blade emanating from his wrist as the pencil sized shard was cut down to an approximation of a pick. "This should do?"

JD was handed it across. Cold, hard tungsten. Shepard had bought ammo for the crew, custom made. The best for the Geth, and yet, in a pinch, could be brought to bear against organics. Not that the type of metal being put through the head mattered that is. For the Geth however, it mattered.

Feeling it over his fingers, between his right index and thumb, yeah, it could work.

"I don't do improv." Hitman took enjoyment in seeing JD squirm, though there was a base hint of curiosity, Bannon raising her hand to settle them. Her face had gotten soft, her green eyes erasing the visage of a tough soldier.

"Let me start then, yeah? I think you can catch on." Bannon had said with her trademark, fierce smirk, and yet it softened as she drank some water, clearing her throat, closing her eyes and laying herself back, getting into the mood.

Sergeant Lisa Bannon. Marine Raider. Hitman Team. A woman lost among the stars, fighting because it made her feel alive. It was something to do, and something she could be told to do with absolute heading. She knew what she was doing in her life and that was enough. In all honesty, JD knew the type. He was the same. It was why he joined the UNSC.

_Now here you go again_

_You say you want your_ _ ** freedom** _

** _Well, who am I to keep you down?_ **

A young joy sprang in JD's heart. He too used to be a teenage heart throb. When life was simpler, when life was his town and school and his friends and crushes and youth. He was 26 now. That was only ten years ago, and yet it was a lifetime ago.

He was glad Stevie still survived in this universe, because he knew her very well.

It's only right that you should

Play the way you feel it

**But listen carefully**

**To the sound of your loneliness**

This life had changed him. JD knew in his bones as he was surrounded by the warmth of squad members and friends. A privilege he had long since discarded for the safety and sanity of isolation in the midst of a losing war. He was no longer lonely. Not in this life. If there was tragedy in the distance, he paid no mind to it as his fingers felt the familiar prick of metal strings deliver rhythm and peace to match the Dreams spoken into music that night. Bannon's voice was perfectly lyrical, ethereal, despite how people had heard her in battle. It turns out people were deeper than what they did.

Like a heartbeat drives you mad

**In the stillness of remembering what you had**

**And what you lost**

**And what you had**

**And what you lost**

In the corner, a Spartan wakes. She is aching and in pain, but the sound she comes to in soothes her. Quietly gathering herself, putting asides her blanket, now wrapped over her in all of its guilty comfort, she peers around the Mako.

Mai had looked from her shadows, awake now, unfamiliar with what was happening. Unfamiliar as a Spartan, but familiar as Mai. New Jerusalem, as a child. Vagrants like her that made money playing the guitar as JD did. She remembered their lonely tunes as they traded talent for pennies.

She wished, long ago, that she could have a talent that would've helped her mother from their poverty.

As she was a child, she was captive to the sound of music as a spell came over her, and she felt rain on her mind's eye.

JD smelled like rain.

Thunder only happens when it's rainin'

Players only love you when they're playin'

Say women, they will come and they will go

**When the rain washes you clean, you'll know**

**You'll know**

Garrus knew what it was like to have a sister. He had one, of course. Solana. He loved her very much, albeit never really reached out as much as he needed to. Work at C-Sec was always busy, and now? Here? It would've put them both in danger if he reached out.

It was okay, momentarily, however. Tali had stirred awake from his own cot, sleepily drifting toward Garrus as he sat, entranced by the homely music. When Tali had realized that it had been JD playing, she too had been captivated, dreamily. Still tired however, she sat next to Garrus, only to lazily intertwine her arm in his as she leaned on him to continue sleeping, just a little bit.

Tali was the little sister that Garrus remembered of Solana. The life that Solana had found herself in: as in one beneath their father, had been hard, rough, coarse. As a brother, he had been there for her. Tali was much the same.

She was the ship's little sister, cared for with such delicate touches that it painted them all as hypocrites.

In the end, she still came out with them on missions. She still was becoming a soldier because of them. She had killed in their name, and hers.

Tonight though, she needed a little warmth, and Vakarian would do as he simply patted her arm as he had done as an older brother, so long ago.

Now here I go again

I see the crystal visions

**I keep my visions to myself**

**It's only me who wants to wrap around your dreams**

**And have you any dreams you'd like to sell?**

Dreams of loneliness

Liara, she is on the crew deck at the mess table, a lamp given to her as she goes over notes, and notes, and more notes. Kaiden is with her, if only for Liara to bounce ideas off of him. Ideas of the apocalypse, of Shepard, of the Reapers and Saren. Liara she is trying to solve this crusade of the rogue spectre before Shepard has to deal with him.

"There has to be a reason. The Reapers can't be a literal deity." She says. In one data pad there's another report almost unrelated. It's about the Covenant.

It's about their Forerunners.

"We can't be forced to kill God." Kaiden almost mistakes Liara's statement as begging. Until he realizes that it is, and his eyes widen as a picture is painted about the Reapers. **"I can't."**

Her life's work was turned on its head, and for all her years looking into the past, she realizes the future is fast approaching.

There was a saying amongst Humans: God was in their heaven, and all was right in the world.

God had left heaven, and it was coming for all of them.

Like a heartbeat drives you mad

**In the stillness of remembering what you had**

And what you lost

And what you had

**Ooh, what you lost**

There are nights for Shepard that are harder than most. Not because of her visions. Not because of the wars she fought in Justice's name. There are nights that are hard for Shepard, like tonight, as she curls up in her bed and dreams of a life she couldn't take to. She balls her blanket, grasping it, fetal position, and holds it to her stomach as she rubs her thumb over her knuckles for reasons she can't understand.

And she cries silently as the pressure of a billion lives reminds her that she needs rest, and not to worry about herself.

Thunder only happens when it's rainin'

Players only love you when they're playin'

Women, they will come and they will go

When the rain washes you clean, you'll know

Oh, thunder only happens when it's rainin'

Players only love you when they're playin'

Say women, they will come and they will go

**When the rain washes you clean, you'll know**

**You'll know**

**You will know**

**Oh, you'll know**

The echo of guitar and voice is there, barely. The good harmonics belonged to JD and Bannon that night, in between rounds of black jack.

It was Garrus that began to clap slowly first. "Bravo."

And it followed, it rolled, Bannon gesturing for JD to stand up and take a bow, and he did. All JD could give his panted, happy breaths in return, unable to say anything as the clapping died down, and all eyes were drawn across somewhere else. Confused, momentarily, JD had realized they were all looking across the bay at Mai.

Her eyes were the eyes of a wolf, always stalking their pray. That's what everyone but JD felt as everyone shrunk down. Mai hadn't cared, and didn't notice, locking those eyes with him.

A beat, a moment, a lifetime. A guitar in his hands and not a weapon, a look of normality on his face. He was a young man. Mai saw a young man in JD's place and she felt content.

It was a common mistake: the way she pressed her finger tips against herself, then to cross her arms over her heart and then pointing at him. He really shouldn't have thought anything of it, as it was an easy way to confuse saying "I like that." He knew he had made the mistake when he first learned it, so it was no surprise that Mai had emulated.

She earnestly wanted to compliment JD on his performance.

What instead Mai had signed was the sign for

I LOVE YOU.

* * *

"Chief Gul, Chief Durante? Here for the show?"

Shepard had been at the cockpit with Joker in the middle of FTL, moments away from exiting. The final hop into Altis was at hand with its relay. Shepard had called for general quarters and a suit up. Something which the two chiefs were more than happy to oblige by. The Covenant were near.

"Aye ma'am." JD had nodded, his SMG across his chest by sling. Mai had been silent, arms crossed, her form assumed again as Spartan, armor and all.

"So the Normandy has some more refit? This seems rather sudden, Commander." Joker had made the comment as the FTL tunnel beamed around the windows. "I thought my baby was complete and whole."

Shepard shook her head as she adjusted her armor. "I thought so too, but apparently we've got something more."

"Whatever. Last time I was here I didn't have all that much time to sight see."

"You been to Altis?" Shepard had asked, and the two chiefs had felt the same rock in their stomach.

"Ahh, once before, Commander. It's ancient history at this point."

JD and Mai didn't know what to expect, slipping out of FTL into Altis. A Covenant fleet in Quarian skin? That was the worst-case scenario. They expected a return to their normal, and they weren't quite sure if they could play the same part.

Mai had been silent when the final jump to Altis was taken, biding her time. If she saw another Elite… She didn't know what she'd do, and that bothered her. She had her orders but she was still a Spartan. She was made to kill Covenant.

"Oop. Room for one more?" It was Tali, sliding by Mai into the cockpit.

Shepard had nearly been on Joker's back with his seat, she turning around to Tali with an excited "Of course!".

The reason had been obvious.

It was almost the same as the chiefs. Tali had in no small part to her own vocal opinion been skeptical, and even detested the idea of the Covenant, and how easy the Quarian people accepted them all based on a crazy coincidence. A coincidence of astronomy:

This galaxy was the same. Eden Prime had been Harvest. Rannoch was Sanghelios. Earth had been Earth. And yet all the Gods were missing. All the heavens were different. Angels and Demons were present where they had no place; misplaced amongst stars.

"Entering Altis's system now. All hands, prepare for heavy traffic." Joker announced over the PA.

Feeling the slow shift in her fleet, Mai had braced herself.

It was not something to be braced about.

A detail overload. A thousand points of information summed up across so many spectrums of context held by different people.

Altis was a shimmering blue globe which painted the entire system its aqua light, and when the Normandy emerged, the silhouettes of the Milky Way's largest fleet appeared to rival the stars in number. Like a giant cloud of chaos, Altis was in the Normandy's range immediately as the once secluded colony had traffic that rivaled Illium. Thousands of ships, and in between them: purple and magenta shapes. JD and Mai had tensed, even seeing it through the Normandy's piloting screens. It hadn't been a bad dream. The Covenant was still here in this galaxy.

Concentrated above the main colony on the oceanic world, the Alliance Fleet fifth stayed in position as silver Council ships intermingled. Perhaps the spread would've been more dispersed if Quarian ships hadn't been constantly breaking or entering orbit. This was still an Alliance colony, but just at a glance, Shepard knew who was in control. It was hard not to be impressed.

In another life, Tali'Zorah nar Rayya would've returned to the Migrant Fleet a hero and be christened Tali'Zorah vas Neema nar Rayya. The offerings of Geth data to the fleet, the fact that she would've been among those that saved the galaxy from the Reapers at the Citadel, it was a destiny unfulfilled here.

In this life Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, over the human colony of Altis, returned home to wage war.

"Commander Shepard," Tali turned away from the vast Migrant Fleet in the Normandy's view as it approached to Shepard, and she nodded, listening. Joker had been going through typical ATC checks, hailing the Alliance channels, identifying the Normandy and Shepard had arrived. "May I identify the Normandy for the Migrant Fleet as well?"

Shepard had considered for a moment. The Normandy had no business with the Migrant Fleet, but, the idea of having it identified for any future contact, it might've been a worthy idea. "Planning on jumping ship, Tali?" Secretly Shepard hoped Tali did. For her sake.

The Quarian shook her head immediately. "I'm with you, Shepard. But… This is my home."

The first time Shepard returned to Earth, she felt born again. Perhaps that was what Tali was feeling she assumed. So, she let it pass, nodding.

With a flick of her omni-tool, keying into the Normandy's comms, Tali had it.

"This is Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, onboard the Alliance ship Normandy. I'd like to register the Normandy as a _kiannu-phar mal mercer_." There were terms that even translators could not decipher, when used in certain contexts. This was one such time.

A garbled radio message, bouncing off traffic that was so heavy over Altis, had finally come through.

_"Tali'Zorah nar Rayya. Verify."_

With that, Tali spoke her people's scripture:

** _"_ ** ** _After time adrift among open stars, along tides of light and through shoals of dust, I will return to where I began."_ **


	28. 1-22: Covenant Up Close - Cortana Would Know

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey hey this chapter I bring it back around to this story's first full circle and I use it to introduce characters so I don't have to fumble around with their canon intros that no one should read if you're reading fanfiction.
> 
> I was going to make a big 1k favorite on FF chapter to celebrate, but I'm going to save that for when we finish Mass Effect 1.
> 
> I do have a few things to say however: Before I ever posted the first chapter of this story, I wrote out scenes, chapter drafts, before I committed. This chapter's is the 2nd oldest behind chapter 1. The scene when the name title card pops was the second thing I ever wrote for All the Stars.
> 
> It's taken me a year or two, but we're here.
> 
> I'm gonna go on for a bit here, seeing as this is an important chapter that I personally do not think I did justice, but...
> 
> I recently downloaded the Master Chief Collection, and, subsequently, played ODST and Reach for the first time since, well, half a decade ago. It's strange, having written this story now. When I played ODST, I wasn't playing the Rookie, I was playing JD. I was playing the JD that never meant Mai, and was destined to die because of a betrayal, unceremoniously. When I played Reach, I played Mai. I outfitted her like I see her, black visor and all, and she became Noble 6. The Noble 6 that didn't take Jorge's place. The Noble 6 that never met JD.
> 
> It is the honor of my fanfiction career that some of you hold JD and Mai, and their story, backstory, who they are, and see them whenever they think of the Rookie and Noble 6. I'm glad that they, in this story, are still identifiable as Noble 6 and The Rookie.
> 
> I'm glad you'll get to see them change and live, a deserve a life of their own.
> 
> Anyway, 1-22. This was originally two chapters but fuck it, full send, make it one.

A/N: Hey hey this chapter I bring it back around to this story's first full circle and I use it to introduce characters so I don't have to fumble around with their canon intros that no one should read if you're reading fanfiction.

I was going to make a big 1k favorite chapter to celebrate, but I'm going to save that for when we finish Mass Effect 1.

I do have a few things to say however: Before I ever posted the first chapter of this story, I wrote out scenes, chapter drafts, before I committed. This chapter's is the 2nd oldest behind chapter 1. **The scene when the name title card pops was the second thing I ever wrote for All the Stars.**

It's taken me a year or two, but we're here.

I'm gonna go on for a bit here, seeing as this is an important chapter that I personally do not think I did justice, but...

I recently downloaded the Master Chief Collection, and, subsequently, played ODST and Reach for the first time since, well, half a decade ago. It's strange, having written this story now. When I played ODST, I wasn't playing the Rookie, I was playing JD. I was playing the JD that never meant Mai, and was destined to die because of a betrayal, unceremoniously. When I played Reach, I played Mai. I outfitted her like I see her, black visor and all, and she became Noble 6. The Noble 6 that didn't take Jorge's place. The Noble 6 that never met JD.

It is the honor of my fanfiction career that some of you hold JD and Mai, and their story, backstory, who they are, and see them whenever they think of the Rookie and Noble 6. I'm glad that they, in this story, are still identifiable as Noble 6 and The Rookie.

I'm glad you'll get to see them change and live, a deserve a life of their own.

Anyway, 1-22. This was originally two chapters but fuck it, full send, make it one.

* * *

**1-22**

**Covenant up Close - Cortana Would Know**

* * *

"_All ships, be advised, SSV Normandy is present, move to accommodate a pathway to the Kilimanjaro."_

In space, thousands of miles up from the nearest road, and traffic still existed as Joker puffed his cheeks and felt the strain of the rush hour that perpetually existed whenever the Migrant Fleet was in a system. He wiped his forehead as he had pretty much all be ceded control of the Normandy to its VI and Alliance ATC; there was frustration of course in denying a pilot his vehicle's control, but traffic was traffic.

Whipping off his cap, rubbing his forehead and receding hairline, Joker slouched back and glanced at Tali over his shoulder. "You Quarians really know how to make an appearance, don't you?"

Staring up through the Normandy's navigational windows, there were more ships than stars.

Tali could only shrug, swatting Joker's shoulder playfully. "How else would anyone pay attention to us?"

It was a crowd that had assembled in the cockpit with Shepard sitting on Joker's arm rest, looking at the Migrant Fleet do as it did over Altis, completely occupying the orbit of the planet with ships from every species, every design language, across the centuries they had been adrift from Rannoch.

It is Wrex that looks up to those ships and recognizes some of them. "There was talk, when the Geth first kicked you out, amongst the Krogan clans." He spoke up, to the glass, but in reality, he spoke to Tali in plain view with everyone, almost narrating the view of thousands of ships performing a delicate, yet utilitarian dance as the Normandy moved below them to link up with the Kilimanjaro.

"Wrex?" Tali looked over to the Krogan, and remembered he hadn't been as young as he was assumed.

"That in order to cur favor with the galaxy again, we'd send ourselves to Rannoch and free it for the Quarians before things got too out of hand." He is also more thoughtful than people assume, especially after his fight with Mai. It is in his words that Tali considers as another view captures the Normandy.

Liara had been looking up mystified by these new ships, the idea that she would meet Covenant soon. Wrex's comment distracted her. Some of her family friends had been alive for that time. "I believe, at the time, the Krogan might've been able to get rid of the Geth. "

Wrex nodded once. "Some people don't like the thought of doing bad things, even if it means an ultimate good. That's why they pay me and don't ask questions."

Shepard had unconsciously nodded.

Just over the Normandy: a familiar sight to two of them. The light emitting circles of a Phantom's gravity lift phases over the Normandy, several dozen meters away before it peels off, and JD and Mai go stone cold in their boots as the crew of the Normandy realizes that there are Covenant ships as well.

"Awfully purple, aren't they?" Bannon as she garners Hitman's collective opinion.

Kaiden looks up in awe as the Covenant craft fly in formation, almost as if in patrol guard or security, intermingling with the Quarian ships. "Yeah…"

Kaiden and Hitman. They were there at Altis when the Solace first fell. They know that first and foremost those ships are ships of war.

Shepard looks up and is only dazzled. "Woah."

"Fighters eh?" Joker comments, noting a few Seraphs. It is Mai that nods to confirm, but no one notices. To admit any knowledge of what they were was to reveal a deeper knowledge she could not afford to show.

To see Covenant up close, like this, it went against everything she knew as a soldier, and a pilot herself. And yet she had to stay her feet, to not show any reaction behind her armor. It is JD that can't hold, and he turns away, basically vibrating, out into the neck of the Normandy amongst its navigation consoles.

He feels, within himself, a tightening ball, one that could only let out if he yelled, if he screamed, if he did something to kill Covenant.

A hand is at his shoulder. Its soft, and its comforting, and it rolls over his shoulder pauldron. He turns over and Shepard is almost face to face with him. She has no helmet on, and he returns the favor against his better judgement, and in that moment, Shepard sees JD pale. There is an insurmountable fear baked into his skin and it crawls beneath his eyes. His young hazel eyes are aged a thousand years.

Any misgivings that she might have with him are wiped away; he's still just a man, clearly. "Are you okay, JD?" She keeps her gloved hand on his shoulder, anchoring him.

He wets his mouth, having gone dry. The memories of a war come back to him, and he cringes, knowing that he had tried to live a life without that reckoning since he had come here. Buried deep inside of him there would always be the Covenant.

Though Shepard's presence, it does something to him. JD forgets the tension, the mistake of days prior, the little glimpse to his truth that Shepard harshly chases after. "I'm… just not used to more aliens, ma'am." And he reiterates his cover story; remembers it and commits it to memory. That concern on Shepard's face is soft and welcoming and the stories of her, the way Emerson damns her, and Kaiden believes in her, makes sense now. As small as a move this is this is the first time Shepard's hypnotic aura takes him: it is in their weakest moments that she imparts strength on people.

Her face hardens. It's a nice face, JD realizes. "Chin up, soldier. Tons of aliens in this galaxy. You have to get used to that." It is such a simple statement she plays straight JD can't help but breath out a laugh and agree, but inside he just balls up and coughs out.

"I'm sorry," he apologizes. "It's just something that's a part of me at this point."

Shepard understands. The hand on his shoulder slips away. "As long as you know better."

Mai stands there, seeing the scene play out, and just for a moment she ignores the Banshees above as the Normandy comes to dock inside of the dreadnought Kilimanjaro.

As the Normandy had left the Kilimanjaro the first time, harboring two hitchhikers from another universe, so it returned. The irony had not been lost on Joker, but he had his orders to keep his mouth shut as the Normandy locked into the frigate bays on the Kilimanjaro with a great mechanical lock.

The Normandy's VI chirped up: "Docking completed. Normandy personnel are advised to wait for the Admiral."

There was only one admiral on the Kilimanjaro, and before the weight of the alert had formed through the crew, the airlock to the Normandy had been wide open with the procession.

Kaiden had riled up through the crowd in the cockpit, spurring the Normandy's personnel to attention as the defacto Admiral of the Alliance Fleet as a whole had walked into its newest ship.

"Admiral on deck!"

Every single Alliance man and woman had stood to attention for their posts. It was Garrus, also there, that had fallen into line as well, rendering salute out of respect.

Admiral Hackett himself, flanked by aides and Marine escort.

JD had held his helmet to his side as his right arm rendered salute. In every universe, the formality of addressing a superior was the same. The eyes which Admiral Hackett caught had been this: Mai, JD, and then finally, Shepard herself. He had approached her until he was almost chest to chest, and she had rendered salute.

"Commander." He had saluted her down and the crew.

"Admiral." She responded in turn, he extending a handshake which she met.

It was then Hackett had gazed upon Humanity's newest ship, the one that was made, in some way, exactly for Spectre work. Shepard had been that next step for Humanity in the same way he had known the Spartan to his back to have been.

"Commander Shepard. If you'll accompany me?"

"Of course, Admiral."

The briefing about her two most mysterious crew members was at hand, and said two had realized this. A dead air had filled their lungs, not sure of what to expect. Hackett had kept straight on staring at Shepard. "Does your crew have any specific orders, right now?"

"No, sir. Shore leave for as long as we're docked here." It would've been a great opportunity for the Normandy crew to interact with the Covenant she reckoned, assuming that transport down to the planet was possible.

"And do you know why the Normandy was called to Altis in the first place?"

"No, sir."

One of the great weaknesses of the Admiralty and the relative autonomy that the admirals all wielded meant that sometimes orders crossed and got lost in the communication. Hackett knew the Normandy was supposed to be in for refit here for a special reason, but no one had told Shepard. Apparently, everyone had been already too occupied with asking her favors to inform her. "Alright then. We'll have you and your command staff briefed. Come with me. Chief Gul? Chief Durante? If you may as well?"

Hitman had frozen as Mai and JD had been called. Was this it? Their great secret revealed?

The weight, the drama, of what words were being said and implications promised had been dropped as another pair of footsteps trotted into the Normandy lightly.

"It's been a hot minute, Hitman."

A female voice, one recognized mutually by both Shepard and Hitman as the Commander peered around Hackett to see someone she considered family. "May I have a moment, Admiral?"

Hackett had smirked with a small headshake. "Of course. I'll talk to the Chiefs in the meanwhile." JD had been right there, and Mai's hearing had picked it up, moving out of the cockpit crowd as Hitman roared out in the surprise of a reunion, Shepard and Mai passing half-way.

It was something to be said that Alec Ryder, as hard as a man as he was, had a wonderful family: Ellen Ryder had been a pioneer, responsible for the first Biotic implants and just about anything else that involved sticking a chip inside heads. Shepard and Kaiden had known her well, for she was the one who handled their operations personally. Infinitely smart, infinitely wise in such a way Shepard wished to be one day. Ellen's terminal condition, contracted from her work, was a tragedy that had it not been for the tangle of what Shepard was doing now, she might've torn up the galaxy to try and save her.

But that was what Shepard owed the Ryder family at least. Alec had raised her in a way that her real family hadn't. Shepard had once been a wild beast of a child, finally joining the Alliance Marines as an eighteen-year-old. It wasn't until Alec had beaten her into what she needed to be to turn into the Marine she had become that she realized that maybe she needed to get over herself and reach out back to her family. Everything she knew about hardball had come from the stout old man.

That was odd, given that his two children had been wonderfully amiable themselves.

One of which had been on the Normandy, wrapped up in a musky group hug of twenty Marines:

Sara Ryder. Had Shepard been a brunette and maybe a less angular face, she herself mused, she would've looked a lot like Sara.

Naturally Sara had been close to Ryder's personal fireteam. "Where the hell is Scott you little book worm?" Emerson had hoisted her into his arms personally after the group hug.

"Hey hey heyyy. Not in public." She swatted Emerson down as Hitman had laughed a genuinely warm laugh that Shepard had yet to pull out of the Normandy's own crew, but it was alright. They weren't hers. Not outright that is. "Scott's out in the Attican, deployed against the Geth."

"Yeah? And why are yo-"

"Auntie Shepard!" Sara had cried out as soon as she saw Shepard out of the corner of her eye, drawing away from Hitman. It was Shepard's turn for a hug, even in armor as Sara did the running jump, only to force Shepard to hold her bridal style.

Tali had been giggling all the while as Garrus and Liara kept tilting their heads in confusion, as if not looking at this whole thing at the right angle.

"Aunt?" Liara had wondered. "Does Shepard have siblings?"

Garrus had shook his head. "I don't think so…?"

The ties that bind people were more than blood and bone; and family to Shepard had been more than what had been written in her very genes. Family had been those she would kill and die for.

She was only a little annoyed as she let Sara down. "Oh, don't call me Auntie kiddo. I'm only like, four years older."

Sara had laughed in response. "I'm telling you Shepard, you've got big Aunt energy."

Shepard's face flattened, very aware all of her crew had been in earshot. "You're making me feel old, you know that?"

"No that's just your old bones. You got a boyfriend yet?"

A hard clamp of Shepard's hand had been on Sara's neck in response. "You know I'm captain of this ship right? I can just toss you out."

The researcher hardly minded. "Oh you'd never. I know how you are; how many chances you love giving people."

And that was true.

"Yeah yeah yeah." Shepard had roughed up Sara's hair. "Now why are you here?"

What Sara had said had stayed Shepard's feet, and if Mai had been listening, she might've heard it, though she was not as instead she attended to Admiral Hackett. She and JD had rendered saluted promptly. "How are you two doing?"

"Condition green, sir." Mai had answered with her steeled voice.

JD had been silent, nodding. To see Covenant again had stayed his breath, returned him to who he was.

"I suppose it piques your interest that the Normandy has returned to Altis?" Both were silent, but complacent as Hackett went on. "I see. Well, Lieutenant Ryder will inform you when we head planetside. It shouldn't be anything too big."

Ryder. The name stayed on their minds as JD finally opened his mouth, looking at Shepard and Sara talk.

"She's Commander Ryder's daughter?" JD had been surprised to see someone so joyful, so full of life, bearing the name Ryder. Just as they studied Shepard in Buffalo, they studied Ryder.

Hackett closed his eyes as he nodded. "The Ryder family has, until recently, served the Alliance with dignity and commendation… Until, of course, Commander Ryder's AI work got out of hand. Now I would say we're better than reprimanding the entire family but… The lieutenants Ryder, the both of them, that is, they would fight for their father."

JD had stared at Shepard, feeling the weight of her hand on his shoulder, and then to Sara, how happy she just was to be with her. "If I can ask…" He started slowly. "What is Ellen Ryder afflicted with?"

Hackett had paused, gathering his thoughts. "I don't think I know off the top of my head, Chief Durante. Why?"

JD was being trained as a medic before Reach, just in the hope to save lives. If he had an idea, a lick of an idea, that maybe, just maybe the UNSC might've had an idea how to cure what hadn't been cured here in this galaxy, he could help. Cancer itself was able to be resolved with one automated operation on many UNSC ships. The Alliance hadn't that ability yet.

"I just want to see if maybe something we know could help her." He looked at Sara again. She was young. He was supposed to look as young as her, but his life, it turned out different. He lost that coin-flip, and he was here on a fluke. "I know what it's like to lose a mother."

**"Me too." **It was Mai. Hackett hadn't flinched, but JD had as he looked to her, staring at Sara as well.

Empathy. It was the very first time JD had felt it from Mai so naturally. The tragedy of it, was that tragedy itself was one of Mankind's greatest, shared experiences.

That was something he and her had shared.

* * *

From the Kilimanjaro, Tali would've been rather interested on the inner workings of an Alliance dreadnaught. She mused that, perhaps, she was the longest serving Alliance Quarian in history at that point, and, given what she had been doing onboard, it was a fair statement.

Though such a curiosity in her was quashed by the need, the opportunity, visit home.

Not her home ship, to be exact, but there had been the research ships that her father had been posted on. It takes a little bit for the shuttle Shepard personally orders to drop her off, but after the most through hazmat and quarantine scrub down she has ever experienced, she steps on Quarian territory, not having completed her Pilgrimage.

The _Alarei_ was one such ship. A Batarian ship, actually, historically, but the Quarian mechanical magic had shifted and molded it into one of the Quarian RD vessels. Nets hanging from ceilings had carried within them yesterday's lab materials or supplies, Quarian researchers doing a double take when they saw, in a fleet of prodigal children, the prodigal child of the Alarei's captain.

Rael'Zorah was as much of a researcher as they. Studious as a Salarian, and yet, there was vindication in each note he wrote, in each project he took on. His reasoning was very simple however, every Quarian understood: He wanted to build his daughter a home on Rannoch.

Though as Rael'Zorah opens his office door on the Alarei to see his daughter in the first time in months, full knowledgeable that she has become a squad mate to Humanity's first spectre and presumably tagging bodies both organic and synthetic, he looks manic.

And yet it is home sweet home for Tali.

"Can you believe it my daughter?" His arms are up in the air as he sees her first, face to face. "They want to jointly rename our homeworld!"

The implication: Rannoch-Sanghelios. It makes her skin crawl.

Tali breaths out disappointed, but it's expected. Always work, always research, instead of family with him. She loves her father though, and that's enough for her as, while he's caught in the expressive gesture, arms raised, Tali instead creeps her arms around him.

"Hello father." She hums into his chest.

He's off-guard for a second, glancing over her head at research assistants chuckling and softly talking about the sight of the ever busy Rael'Zorah being soft and affectionate, though he cannot deny his daughter as he clamps, awkwardly, her into the hug all the same. "Ah, yes. Hello Tali."

It's a moment in the doorway. With the galaxy now moving faster than any relay could ever shoot them, it's those tiny moments like this that keep her mentally well:

It's leaning on Garrus as JD plays a Human love song on a guitar. It's listening to Shepard shout with all the bombast of childhood dreams. It's seeing Hitman accept her, train her, mold her into a soldier.

These are the things that the Pilgrimage thus far has imparted upon her.

It is as Tali falls into the topic that Rael has brought up that Rael knows that she has changed, looking dead into his eyes: "I spit at the Covenant if they'd try."

Rannoch is for Quarians. Not the Geth. Not the interlopers.

"My, Tali. Manners?" Rael motions over his shoulder. His office isn't big, the fact that he has one as a Quarian is a signifier of service and need, though floating in the middle of it, fondling a data pad is what Tali can only describe as floating, fleshy, cotton candy. Tentacles reach out from a worm like head as bio-luminescence paints the normally warm colors of this room a colder blue.

He holds her shoulders as her eyes go wide at the sight of, as the translators put, an _Engineer._ "Now the Covenant might not know their place, and how much the Quarians have lost, but they are useful. Come. We have much to discuss."

And like that, Tali is a girl again (or at least, more of a child than she is now). The only times she really spent with him growing up father was when he needed someone to bounce theories off of. So, she sits in a chair backwards, shotgun on her hip, listening to the only blood and flesh family she has left, and he speaks to her that maybe, just maybe, the Quarians will return to Rannoch _in less than a year_.

* * *

In the Kodiak down, once past re-entry, Shepard opens up the side and she looks down at what has become of Altis through a hazy grey, clouded day.

The five of them: Hackett, Ryder, Shepard, and the two chiefs, that ride this particular Kodiak down through the clouds of air traffic and actual clouds. Altis is the same as it always was: blue oceans, blue skies, and a relatively tropical climate all around. A place for retirees or water barons to ship out desalinated water to the less hydro-resource minded colonies. The big difference is in who is there, and the two giant additions to the horizon: the now floating city of the Covenant's A Long Night of Solace. Spreading out like a spiderweb along the side facing the Altis colony were purple platforms, structured out like oil rigs in Earth's past. They had spread up and down the side of the Solace, and then outward for at least a kilometer outward, and progressing. The beehive like combs of the head and tail end of the Solace were being shaved down, the material reallocated elsewhere as the wreckage was being turned into more a building whose mass and size could only be rivaled by the Thessian skyscrapers or the ancient Prothean structures themselves.

Atop the Solace had been Covenant landing platforms, grafted to give the air traffic that was concentrated around the Solace a suitable facility. Otherwise Covenant troop formations were always present, training, exercising, attending to a warrior rite that the galaxy had seen only when they first arrived.

Quarian ships had hovered above the Solace, shuttles of their own exchanging in and out with the Covenant Phantoms and Seraphs.

Directly south-east, a few klicks from the Solace had been none other than the Altis colony itself. A 300 square kilometer island being built upon by a city referred to as Altis by itself. Citadel and Alliance ships held above it, intermingling with the Covenant air traffic as Altis became ground zero for a cultural and technological exchange program that, in the Citadel's several thousand-year histories, they hadn't seen before.

Though there was another feature to Altis. A few dozen kilometers south of Altis had been a quarantine bubble erected by the Alliance in record speed. Before the Citadel had even been able to fully set up in Altis following Covenant landfall, the Alliance had hidden the wreck of the UNSC Frigate Savannah.

Shepard was the only one who hadn't known that as she stood, looking out onto Altis. "Landfall took out an oil rig, huh?" She gestured to the giant white bubble; Alliance security thick and heavy around it.

Hackett nodded, holding onto his cap as the gusts of an open shuttle threatened to kick it off. "Some nasty chemicals got loose from their drilling agent. It's in our interest to not have an environmental disaster on this planet as well."

"Right." Shepard drew her gaze out to the Solace, it captivated her. It captivated her in the same way the Citadel did, or the first time she ever saw a Relay. She appreciated the sight, the thought, like she always did with the new amongst the stars. Though imprinting it to her mind she found something else: A conversation, desperation.

"_A certain Covenant supercarrier could with, some assistance, suffer the same unfortunate accident."_

_"Even for you, Kat, that's-"_

_"Inspired?"_

_"Not the word I would use."_

Shepard is uneasy as she hears voices in her head not screaming about flesh and metal and the apocalypse. She hears instead voices… a plan, an execution. She sees more people like Mai, and she lurches forward unknowingly to the opening of the shuttle.

JD is the closest to Shepard, seeing what's happening, grabbing her waist as the entire shuttle's passenger load jerks.

"Woah!" Shepard lets out of her mouth as JD keeps his hands around Shepard's waist.

Even through the armor he can feel her pounding veins, her uneven breaths. They're familiar to him for some reason. She pats JD's hand as she settles herself into a seat. "I'm good, JD. I'm good."

"Are you okay, Commander?" Hackett asks her as she feels the pounding in her head.

She winces, hiding it with her hands as she beats it down like a Batarian and forces her smile, her go-to confidence. "Ripe as rain, Admiral. Just these last few weeks have been hard."

"Ah. I see."

Sara is worried, but she says nothing, glancing at her datapad and remembering what exactly has been happening to Shepard these last few weeks: of dreams and memories that aren't her own, from this galaxy and not.

Mai says nothing, reacts like the statue she is sometimes, and instead mirrors Shepard. She can't stand the sight of the Covenant, and it remains still, even now, as knife edge finger nails threaten to cut through her suit.

The reason why Sara was there was finally said plain and loud as they touched upon the landing pad of the Alliance FOB in Altis, Marines keeping perimeter and patrols throughout Altis as Covenant, Citadel personnel, and Quarians made themselves at home in a colony that had never seen such activity.

Sara's voice is like a chirping bird in its cadence, so unlike Shepard's deeper, matronly tone. "Chief Gul, Chief Durante. I'll be handling upgrades to your systems, if you'll wait in the FOB for me? I'll be arranging transport to our test facility."

Shepard's face is written with surprise as all of them disembark the Pelican. "Never took you for the spooky kinda stuff, Sara." The Commander taps her shoulder with her gauntlets. "Did the Old Man put you onto it?"

The mention of Commander Ryder made Sara's peppy attitude stutter; however, she recomposed, shaking her head. "Oh, you know, gotta explore all my career options, Shep… Hey, I heard from XO Shepard that you're getting dinner with her later? Want to catch up then?"

Hackett had smiled as the two talked. He had known Shepards all his life, and they always served him well. One was the XO of the Kilimanjaro, the other was the Commander of the Marines of the Kilimanjaro, and the last had been the one standing before him: Humanity's first Spectre.

It hurt him very much that he had to lie to the greatest of them now.

She smiles, forgetting all of her troubles and the storm in her mind as she leans down on Sara and pecks a kiss upon her forehead. "I'd love to."

* * *

As JD and Mai disembark, witness to all of this and hearing Sara's orders regarding them, all they could do was just bare witness to Shepard in her element: being herself, giving off such a friendly aura it made everything she did on away mission that much darker.

"Commander. If you'll follow me, you have a debrief awaiting you." Hackett had said, glancing at the two chiefs. "You two can head to the checkpoint up front. You have clearance."

"Yes, sir." Mai responds as usual. How, in these situations, she is the one speaking for JD, there is but a little irony in it.

"See you in a bit chiefs." With a long gaze Shepard looks the two of them over as if for the last time. JD is in Mai's shadow as usual, and his black armor fits the part. Their faces are still hidden behind those damnable brain buckets, but because of that she can only remember their touches at that moment: Mai holding onto her wrist for dear life during Eden Prime, and JD, just now, hands around her waist.

"Shepard." JD rattles out, and he gives her a nod of his head as Hackett and Shepard disappear into the administration building of the FOB. Sara has disappeared as well, leaving just them, just like Buffalo all over. Though now is different. They're different people, different understandings, more comfortable in the very skin they wear.

Alliance Marines only take glances at them as they go on their duties, Marine directing traffic telling them in no kind word to get out of the way of the landing pad for more Kodiaks to touch down.

JD is sure to look over his shoulders before getting Mai's attention, making a hook with his index finger several times as recognizes the Spartan Sign.

Over their comm systems they can speak plainly with no one else hearing, walking side by side to the base's checkpoint. It's attached to the wider streets of Altis, dead in the middle of the city. Alien ships fly above and they try their best to not look up to ignore that fact.

"Upgrades?" JD asks. "You heard anything on your private line?"

In Mai's head she realizes that the person who she has been communicating with in regards to research on her armor on a private line on her omni is probably Sara, however she has nothing for JD. She shakes her head once. "I do not know."

"I uh, doubt they can upgrade you anymore so…" JD leads off quietly, making their way through sand floors, Marines and Alliance servicemembers not sure whether or not to salute. Some do, some stare at Mai, but for the most part they keep their distance. She is a monster still in form and presence, and how she was "upgraded" to be that way JD has been told by her in the most technical of details. Out of politeness, courtesy, or just plain oversight, he didn't ask what he did now: "Mai, when they augmented you, did it hurt?"

He turns his head to look up at her and she stops her stride. He knows now this is what happens when she stops and thinks on a question she's never had before. He tries to look at her face but there is nothing but the dark. It looks back at him finally however.

"I do not know." Again.

She remembers the needles through her veins, through her skull, injecting fluids that still remain to this day. The bone grafts she doesn't know if she was awake for, but it evokes a feeling of dread to imagine it happening to her as she is now. The Human body and what it looks like, inside and out, broken and bent and torn apart, she is intimately familiar with, and her fight with Wrex has reminded her that inside, if someone opened her up, she would be recognized as (probably) Human.

She was made, not born.

Made to fight a war against the Covenant; and, more specifically, made to die against the Covenant.

It very much is written into her bones that that is what she is supposed to do, and to deny it is to deny existence herself.

As JD considers pain, Mai, in the shadow of a guard tower, disappears from him.

When he finds her, she is out of the FOB entirely, in the middle of the street. Rushing up to her to ask what she sees; the answer is like a memory.

Just about waist height with the ODST, a creature that was otherwise assigned with a datapad to collect supplies from Altis's markets instead, in its preoccupation, bumps into the metal leg of Mai.

"HEY! Watch it!" It screams out in its whiny, translated tongue, looking up to see nothing less than a **Demon**. "Hua-?! Wha?! AaaaaHHHH!"

The datapad is thrown, its glass surface breaking as Mai's slung DMR is held in her hand and the Grunt runs away from her screaming for its mother toward the closest authority figure, down the street. She tracks it as JD sees what Mai had noticed on her motion sensor. Hers had a range that his didn't, and now it is alight with red.

When one Grunt screams, any in ear-shot immediately revert to panicking as well, and at least the screams of a dozen echo out as Alliance bystanders cock their heads and refuse to intercede on the grounds that, maybe, this is a Covenant dance happening. It's only Grunts that the two chiefs see at first, but they lead to more familiar faces.

First, it's the Jackals, ducking out of the corners as they see what the Grunts are running from, otherwise busy talking to Salarians or Humans about further trading or directions, sniffing at the air as if to confirm what their eyes put before them down the city street. Soon enough, the true warriors of the Covenant take note.

The Grunts cowered, the Jackals sneered as they deferred to higher powers, doing their duties and going about their day like any other inhabitant of that galaxy, unaware at first that a spectre from the past, the war, had followed them.

The Great Journey's greatest enemies appeared on main street Altis. Battlefields of the Human-Covenant War, their ghosts came down concrete roadways beneath unfamiliar stars. Out of the Alliance FOB, out of the cover of Commander Shepard, JD and Mai remembered that they fundamentally shared the same fate as several million of the Covenant now: A life in this galaxy.

It was a strange thing what a few months did. What it did to a war, to its soldiers, to two galaxies. Here, and now, on main street Altis, Noble Six and the Rookie stood for one brief moment as they were in their old lives. No Alliance or Citadel figure had noticed the two of them, or anything that was happening. No one from that galaxy did, as those from a different Milky Way froze in their own bubble and remembered that once they knew what was to happen:

Mai had held the pistol grip of her DMR tight, her right heel cocked to throw her into cover as JD felt the beaten and suppressed synapses pop off again: Seeing so many Covenant, in front of him, it was that he was going to die. It was the feel of fear. It was that fear that fueled his fighting fire.

A Sangheili Minor, discussing logistical support with a Quarian quartermaster stopped mid-sentence, half a block down, as he had walked through the Quarian to stand on a lane of the street fully. Likewise: another Sangheili Major had revealed themselves from out of a shadow of a Council cargo vehicle, the Grunts and the Jackals all so naturally falling behind them. This feeling: this natural feeling. Confrontation. This was their normal once.

A Jiralhanae growls, nearly breaking the light post he was leaning on as he racks back his grenade launcher.

The Council, the Alliance Marines, pedestrians and bystanders, they had all been cut out of the lives of the Covenant present as they moved, slowly, to adjust themselves. Battle positions, cover, places to fire upon. The distance between the Humans, not just any Humans, but the **Humans, **had been no more than a block at most.

The Sangheili Major barked at the Minor, and for the first time in their lives, Mai and JD had overheard, understood, what the tense voicings of Elites were. The translators gave them a lingua franca.

"What- What do we do?!" The Minor held his Needle Rifle uneasily.

Everyone there knew the score. They were guests. All of this was left behind. Though that was the same as telling fire not to melt ice. In life, events happen naturally. Life, death, and the inevitability of Spartans fighting Elites.

The Major had said nothing. The pull, the feel of honor tore at his teeth as his hands drifted over his energy sword.

Main street Altis. Like so many main streets on over a hundred different colonies in a different galaxy. Every Covenant knew what this fight would look like. They knew what a street, torn up by plasma grenades and bullets and teeth looked like. They knew what bodies lying dead on cover and in pieces were to appear like after a Spartan threw themselves into the fray.

"Mai." JD had spoken; begged. He held onto her forearm as he pleaded. "**Please don't**."

And yet his body betrayed him as he whispered to her. His legs cocked, his feet oriented, the machine in his mind that told him how to fight Covenant returned itself as he looked for cover and saw the Elites. Where were the Jackal snipers? There were always Jackal snipers. He had enough grenades to deal with them, but the Brute to the side, down the way? Too many bullets to afford before the Elite-

"JD." Mai spoke back, shaking JD's hand off of her roughly. She felt like she could break the DMR in her hands as Spartan Time coiled in her head. Just one second, one moment, and it would be off. Everything she was trained wanted to go off like an explosion and she had felt as if sand paper was in her blood, grating against her very being.

She should've kicked this off already. She should've activated her active camo and disappeared and started killing them all.

Everything that wasn't Human.

Every Asari, every Turian, every Quarian, every Grunt, every Brute, every Hunter, every Jackal, every Elite.

Even a Human if they got in the way.

She would **kill **them all.

"Go away, JD." She spoke again. _Save yourself._

Within herself she finds that she needs him to live. It's the only reason why she hasn't kicked off yet.

Like a magnet, JD cannot. Not with her. He'd done so once when they first fell here on Altis. She was going to die if he hadn't returned.

_Oh God. This is it._

JD had felt for the safety on his SMG as he gripped his gun as well. The opportunity of a new life, of another chance to live, it receded away from him and he realized how fragile that very idea had been. Maybe it was Mai. Maybe it was Mai speaking the truth of himself to him.

Orbital Drop Shock Trooper.

That's what he was, and he had almost forgotten.

Mai always knew what she was, no matter what JD would try to impress upon her.

"I'm not letting you do this." He let the words fall out of him. It was the words he could not think about; it was the words that he **_needed _**to say. Mai had looked at him in a glance, over her shoulder, and her helmet, her visor, they did not depolarize. She was a Spartan. He wasn't done. "Not alone. Never."

"You don't need to do this." Mai had sounded urgent. Was she begging? In her subdued monotone it almost broke.

"But **I have to**."

He was an ODST, and she was a Spartan, and there were Covenant ahead of them and guns in their hands and a duty to carry out that carried with them the lives of every Human that ever lived and every Human that would ever be. And yet…

The Major had felt his hand come to grip his sword fully, but he did not draw. He knew the orders, the stakes, the new context of who they were in this galaxy. In any other pretense he would've cried havoc already. Though this was the one where the Covenant never fought the Spartans. Where they never fought Humanity. It tore at his honor, at every Sangheili dead from Demons in the thirty years since the Crusade began. And yet…

"Major Kavumee?" The Quarian spoke to the Major, seeing the Minor he was speaking to come to him. What was going on? The Quarian drew his eyes to the two Humans, so unlike the rest of the Alliance, and the tension he felt was that of gravity itself.

The Grunts chittered, shook in their own bodies as the Jackals charged their shields and rifles. The Brute huffed, displeased that the pleasantries hadn't started yet.

A moment, stretched out into years. In Mai's head this battle played out a million ways and she thought of a billion ways she could kill these Covenant.

All anyone needed was the excuse: The veil of this façade to go down and to resume what they started over Reach, over Harvest.

_Tap tap tap tap._

The clicking. The sound that spoke above the loudness of silence on Altis that day, on that street as forces gathered and the knife's edge of combat came so close to cutting, it came as rain did. Because it had been rain.

Wetness, from the sky, droplets of heaven. Tears almost. On worlds like Altis, showers came like the wind, and the buildings were designed for it. All of them had patios and balconies for those that lived there to shelter from the wetness at a moment's notice. The grey clouds above finally unloaded.

It came hard, and it came heavy, but not heavy enough block the view. They were like statues. All those from the Human-Covenant War were stuck in time as those unacquainted dashed for the cover of buildings and balconies, leaving the rest out in the rain.

Against their combat harnesses and armor, it pricked at them with clicking sounds that reminded them that nature itself would continue if they didn't.

There was an alert from the Altis weather station earlier: a risk of rain.

Mai could see through her augmented senses the way water pooled on the armor of the Elites, running down their helmets, running down their mandible guards. She could feel every raindrop on herself through her armor as the water came and it bathed them all.

It washed them clean, any dirt, any battle on their armor yet to be wiped away, it fell to the street.

It was the Elite that moved first, and Mai had nearly whipped her rifle up and started firing, then and there. She wanted so much to kill them all.

The Elite hadn't moved to fight however. The hand that rested on his sword moved in front of him, palm up, as if to feel the rain properly as it came down. Clear as crystal, a gift from the Gods. The Elite Major had a fascination with nature. It was in his sect of faith, an interpretation given by the Prophet of Destiny, that it was right that the paths chosen of the Solace and her crew brought them to Altis. It was a beautiful world. For all the tribulations that their Gods put upon them, it was their kindness that it gave them a world of blue skies, temperate beaches, and rain. Paradise.

For Sangheili, in this situation, it was better to taste the rain not from their palms difficultly, but with their eyes to the sky, head back. So, the Major did, closing his eyes, letting the rain wash over him as he tasted fresh water through his jaws, past his tongues, down his throat.

It was a sign from the Gods that of all the things to feel right now, it had nothing to do with the Demon and their Imp.

The Major opened his eyes, clearing them of the rain, as he looked at the Humans one last time.

It was a bated look, a measured look.

He pitied them.

His arm had slashed out toward the Minor, to all those he commanded. "Go on. As you were. Leave them to their fates."

The Great Journey would stay their feet. They would be left behind.

The Brute growled out in disappointment, the Elite Minor had seemed surprised, and those lower breathed out a sigh of relief as they got out of the road and the rain. Turning away, the Major had looked at the two Humans over his shoulder, just one last time. Just to tell himself that in another life, he knew what they would look like beneath his heel.

And then he disappeared into the rain, to his duties.

The Covenant moved on.

The Spartan and ODST remained.

* * *

There is far more of the Admiralty inside the Altis FOB than she would deem safe for the Alliance, and the need for what she had requested, not as an Alliance officer, but as a Spectre. It is as she enters the building and she renders salute for no less than half a dozen admirals and what appear to be two Alliance Intel agents, she realizes that her intuition about the chiefs was correct. They went far higher than Anderson.

"Now, Commander Shepard, you have put us in a very difficult position." Vice Admiral Nguyen, a steely Asian woman of the Alliance's Ops and Tactics board opens up. She's the final word for all ground-based ops in the Alliance; she and Shepard have shaken hands more than once. She sits at the conference table, the first to speak as formalities end and Shepard is given the closest seat to her: an end seat. At the other end Hackett sits.

It's no more than two meters in distance between Shepard and Hackett, but for Shepard, it's the distance of cover on Elysium on its farm fields as Batarians open fire on her and the militia: impossibly far away.

"I apologize, Vice Admiral." Shepard squares her shoulders. "However, may I speak frankly?"

In a room full of Admirals, Shepard still leads. "You may, Commander." Hackett affirms. Admiral Drescher of the Second Fleet scoffs. Shepard understands however: a man such as him respects regulations. He had been in command of the fleet ever since First Contact, nearly thirty years ago. Hermann Goring comes to mind when she sees him.

"Presuming this meeting has been brought together to brief me about Master Chief Durante and Master Chief Gul, I just have to say that there's no need for this. If there was something so pressing about Durante and Gul regarding who they are, I don't think it was a wise decision to put them on my crew."

Drescher responds immediately. "The crew was inherited, Shepard. You should be well to remember that."

"Of course. But speaking to Captain Anderson revealed that he had no more information about the two of them than me. Evidently this issue would still arise."

It's the formality of calling upon issues of the Admiralty that necessitates their presence here. Not that they needed to be actually, but the form and function of Alliance structure and the idea of information being needed to be known and under purview, it coalesced in that sleek metal room. "Well it wouldn't be an issue with Captain Anderson, Commander Shepard." Drescher holds his hand against his cheek, elbow against the table, speaking such disdain.

Shepard is unfazed. "I'd like to know why."

So that's why they're there today.

The Admiralty is busy, to say the least. She knows because she's multi-tasking a dozen favors up and down the leadership with the Normandy. Even in this room there are tasks still yet to be done. Perhaps that's why some are looking at her sympathetically: that this is something more that they can award her with than requisition favors and good will.

The Alliance Fleet has been pushed out to the very borders of the Attican, securing colonies as the Citadel also attends to its interests in the region. The Turian patrol fleets often clash with the Geth, if only to chase battles, but now, as the Covenant and Quarian alliance ramps up, Quarian ships are also contending with the Geth. The Covenant has not yet fought, but they are simply there, on Altis, building up and training a ground force meant to reclaim Rannoch.

Details of such an invasion Shepard barely catches in her intel briefs from both Alliance Intelligence and Spectre lines. She's too busy making sure a galaxy is there to politic about in.

Pickets, raiding forces, the synthetic menace pokes and prods at the colonies with the efficiency given to them as machines, and as the fleets of the Citadel and its allies beat them back, it is Shepard alone that is trying to find the source of it:

Saren, yes, in one way, but the nightmares have given her an answer beyond. A root that she has to dig down, dig deep, down into the dark heart of what it means to be alive in a reality where God wants her dead.

The Admiralty starts shifted uncomfortably, but they settle eventually. Only two men she picks out in that room are at all comfortable and she immediately knows why: They're spooks. The Alliance Intelligence agents lean back, waiting for their time as they glance at Hackett: A man with a cleft lip, and a man with sunglasses. She knows the sort. She has two on her crew.

"I'm not gonna waste time with this, Commander, so I'm gonna just state outright the glaring issue as it is: You are you." The Admirals, they look at Hackett for this. He knows how to deliver news.

Shepard scrunches her face, almost glaring, head tilted. "I don't follow, Admiral?"

"The issue is you because of your history, for Master Chief Durante and Master Chief Gul, **they were Cerberus once.**"

She feels her fingers begin to numb. She feels her throat tighten up. She remembers years ago about an entire Marine force swallowed whole by an experiment. She remembers every Cerberus crony she had to beat into a pulp as they spoke their holier-than-thou, supremacist, nationalist rhetoric as a justification for killing her men. Her blood goes cold and she rubs her thumb across her knuckles as all she can manage is a single word:

"Oh."

* * *

Sara found them on the street, almost frozen, standing like children lost of their mother. "Hey, Chiefs?" She started slowly, drawing their vision to where they were looking: The Covenant working in the street, interacting with this galaxy's inhabitant as if it had been normal, Humans walking on the same street as the genocidal union that, for thirty years, wanted nothing more than the total annihilation of an entire people.

"Why did the Alliance choose this way?" Mai spoke in her dead monotone, face hidden in her helmet as she saw insanity. "Why aren't they all **dead**?"

It was true: Sara was a chipper person usually. She was fun, full of love, and she enjoyed what she did. Whether it was digging up Prothean ruins or late nights on her omni, reading classical novels, she found joy wherever she did. She found joy because that was the promise she made to her own mother. Ellen Ryder, laying in a bed, wasting away, comatose. That was the last thing she spoke to her daughter.

It was in the darkness of Mai's words that Sara found so much sorrow. Mai's story had read of a tragedy, and she knew that her training alone didn't account for her asking why the Alliance hadn't killed millions.

There was a testament to where they came from that JD had remained in her shadow, still antsy, still poised to fight with her. Even if it would've been a losing battle.

"That's not something I can answer, Chief Gul." Sara finally says, looking at the two of the, dripping with rain. "If you two will follow me."

She drags them through a different type of city: a Human one, surely, Altis started life as a Human colony made in the image of the cities like in Greece or Malaysia, glass towers and stone, however the difference was in who walked among it. Humans, Asari, Turians, Quarians, the odd Krogan or two, Salarians, Volus, Drell and Elcor. Intermixed are the names which are both new and old to JD and Mai: Sangheili, Huragok, Mgalekgolo, Unggoy, Kig-Yar, Huragok, Yanme'e, and Jiralhanae.

They find their place so naturally, even in their battle armor, even with some of them wielding weapons. They just look like people, going about their day, and to the two of the UNSC, it just feels so fake.

They are dragged through town as they keep their head down, Sara guiding them to the docks and harbor as every single person looks at them. Names pass by their ears, and JD knows they're all for Mai as she keeps her head down, hands curled into the tightest fists he had ever seen.

_Demon. Monster. Is that a man? Spirits. Goddess. Nothing but a man._

It is said in whispers, by familiar lips, from mouths that only now speak English because of a translator.

JD looks up and sees a Salarian looking at him from his clinic's steps. They wear the equivalent of a Salarian medical uniform, white and red, scars on their face with black eyes burning into the two of them.

"Fascinating." JD hears the Salarian speak to himself before words start cascading out of his mouth, turning away, taking notes.

In this galaxy, the Tower of Babel was erected, and the cost was what JD had spoken to Mai, tried to help her understand: It humanized them as much as it might've done the same vice versa.

Lingua franca.

There is no such service in the UNSC, even if English is the main language overall. It is fine though. Mai knows that pain is the same in every language, and that is what she spoke on the battlefield for all her life. Even the Covenant knew what screams meant.

When they make it to the docs they feel as if they fought an entire campaign, and Sara may or may not know if she did it on purpose. What she does relent to them as they come up on an Alliance secured dock is this: "Sorry we had to go through the city, we can only take water-borne transport out to the Site Delta."

Bobbing along the sides of the dock almost as if a carnival water ride are rows and rows of Makos in LST configuration: open tops, many are manned or in use, cargo being ferried off and onto the dock into them. It is only when they stop trying to avoid gazes do the two of them look out and see a grey bubble in the distance.

Somewhere, beneath the veil, was the last remnants of the UNSC they would ever know.

A Marine transport officer had quickly adjusted the buoyancy needed on the Mako after seeing Mai. This was their ride, Sara hopping in first as JD followed shortly after. Mai had taken it one foot at a time.

"To the site?"

"Affirmative." Sara nodded to the Marine, and soon enough the four of them had been underway, sea spray misting them all as they sat in silence.

The drone of Phantoms and Banshees above combined with Kodiaks and further ships.

It is the buzz of the Mako's engines kicking up water that makes JJD reflective. The fountains of the Cirsium City had been his only real exposure to bodies of water outside of the shower. He wasn't quite sure if he could swim, personally. In training it was different. Out here, in the oceans of the wild? He didn't know, looking down and seeing his helmet stare back at him.

"Is the Alliance upgrading our equipment?" Mai breaks the silence like a stone against her fist.

"The Normandy is being brought onto Block II specifications." Sara starts, looking up to the Alliance fleet above. "All the Normandy-classes are, in light of recent developments."

"Then what are we actually doing?"

Sara turns her head to Mai as she asks. "Something that only you can do."

* * *

Shepard leans back into her chair, reevaluating the very idea of Jon-James Durante and Mai Gul. Yes, they were flagged with xenophobic tendencies, and they fought as if they had hate in their hearts, but JD's relationship with Garrus? Mai's utilitarian (mostly) unproblematic association with the entire crew? It didn't quite sit.

"They're Cerberus?" Shepard asked quietly, blankly looking at the table.

Hackett nodded. "Correct, but, they are exceptions to the group of course."

"I'd like to know."

Hackett continued to Shepard's caution. "You'll have a report forwarded to you when you return to the Normandy, but, speaking to the point: What you've heard from them in regards to their backgrounds are correct. Chief Gul was indeed a space born orphan and Chief Durante is Earthborn. The details in regards to their service in the Alliance however wasn't, exactly, true."

Which was why none of the other N7s had ever heard of them or known of anyone like them.

"Then what, Admiral, were they doing?"

The man with Sunglasses picks his head up, hand up at Hackett before he picks up.

"Well it's a little bit more complicated than that. Chief Durante's story with Cerberus is a tad simpler, however Chief Gul we'll have to dig into:"

Shepard crosses her arms, trepidation in each breath of hers. "Well, go on, I've been waiting my entire damn command."

There is a line that Sunglasses toes as he begins, and Shepard knows, though he has to go on. "As you _might _understand, orphans, or children put up for adoption, are liable to disappearing unfortunately, especially out in the colonies. You nabbed a freighter carrying Human slaves a few days ago, correct?"

Shepard, she rubs her knuckles as her nails dig into her armor's gloves and gauntlets, nodding.

"Well, unfortunately Chief Gul as a child was picked up by Cerberus, or, at least, a permutation of Cerberus. As you know Cerberus often has operations that work independently and isolated from each other, which was why when you went after the group responsible for Akuze you didn't bring back too much actionable intel on Cerberus as a whole."

"I remember my actions very well… But Chief Gul was kidnapped?" There is the memory of her nightmares: a girl being taken by a black van. "What colony? Where?"

"We don't know." Sunglasses looks to his compatriot Cleft-Lip. "However, they raised her with an education only a group like Cerberus could give, and, also, tested on her."

"Jesus." Shepard lets fall out of her mouth. "Is that why…?"

Cleft-Lip nods, taking over. "It's why she has the stature she does. She was tested on and made into the ideal Human soldier, for Humanity."

Sunglasses can only hammer it in. "Master Chief Gul became an experiment of Cerberus. The Alliance has no Project MJOLNIR. Cerberus, instead, has deemed her a Spartan."

"What?" Shepard had asked, rings around her eyes deep. More knowledge. More to bear.

There is a screen in that room and Sunglasses flashes his omni, sending up an image. It's photographs. Armor, as if at a crime scene: It's Mai's armor, a different color, battle-hardened and dusted. Pictures of Mai herself, stark naked, the scars that she once had seemingly tracing every vein on her body. Then a final picture: It's Mai and JD, in a cell together, Mai's eyes are wild and JD's are confused. On an overlay of that picture: CLASSIFIED. It holds on it as Sunglasses continues. "Project Spartan. That's what they called the bio-engineering portion. Project MJOLNIR is the tertiary armor system. It's one of a kind."

Cleft-lip follows up. "Master Chief Gul, she is, in multiple forms, socially and mentally stunted. I'm sure you've noticed this."

_Socially and mentally stunted. _Those words sit with her. "I know she's not outgoing or particularly friendly, but so is half the damn special forces cadre." Shepard remarks. Even she herself was a basket case, and, depending how this mission was going to go, maybe going to be again.

"No, but we ran test on her." They did. It's forcefully said as a man with a cleft-lip in Alliance Intelligence uniform (which is to say no uniform). "Psychological profiling. First few times we ever debriefed her we slid in implicit codewords and key phrases and gauged reactions, posed questions to her. Empathy testing even."

Sunglasses, titular accessory shielding the blue glow of augmented eyes, nodded in agreement. "She has it within her to be, perhaps, one of the smartest say, mathematicians or engineers we've seen, but anything wandering into liberal arts? Nada." There's more joke in there than most of the room appreciates.

"Put it simple. I was a Marine. I can do not nice words." Shepard is compelled, even with someone she doesn't trust completely, to defend them. Mai deserves that much if she did suffer.

**"She belongs in a ward."** Cleft-lip finally puts down. "She's a danger to society."

"We see it all the time with other Cerberus experiments." Sunglasses goes on. "I know you like your evidence so Alliance Intelligence would be glad to forward you dossiers from others. Most, if not all of them currently tearing up their part of the galaxy and if Saren wasn't an issue, your responsibilities as a Spectre would've led you to them eventually."

Half-machine, half-organic augments who can't tell what it's like to feel anymore. Mind-bent intelligence experiments that force those subjected to imagine paradoxes for the rest of their lives. A biotic supernova of a woman on the other side of an emotional seesaw as Mai.

The list went on.

Cleft-lip goes on. "As for Durante. Turian criminals in New York killed his parents. It's not hard to imagine why he would join Cerberus afterwards."

That's all JD got, a footnote. One that made sense. Aliens killed his family. He was a simple man backed by tragedy and the simple urge to do something about it.

"How did we get them?" Shepard asks, eyes glued to the photos on the screen, as are the rest of the admirals present, aware of the true context of how they were taken.

"A raid on a Cerberus black site. Nothing too exciting."

"And Mai was taken without a fight?" Shepard was surprised.

Cleft-lip nodded. "Biotics handled her."

Shepard felt the buzz of her implant momentarily. How little she actually practices, and yet how natural she was one. And yet she did not abide by her abilities. It wasn't fair.

"Then why are they together?" She asked. They were together, distinctly.

"From reports correlated from Normandy logs, XO Pressly, XO Alenko, their own reports, Sergeant Emerson, and of course your own writing, the answer is plain: Chief Durante is very much Chief Gul's handler."

"No. Not handler." Shepard corrects, realizing. "**Her friend.**"

_It's midnight on the Normandy, and Chief Gul and Chief Durante are awake, together. A rare occurrence. Shepard is awake as well, combing over ideal paths for the Normandy to chart. A thousand different favors, side-missions she'd like to think, and she would have to do them all in one go if they were to keep pace with rumors of Saren and the Geth. Liara had been trying to piece together Prothean hotspots that Saren would be interested in to no avail in Shepard's quarters, and the two of them had talked over a crucial subject: Plan B._

_"Getting the galaxy together to fight against something they don't even believe exists?" Liara throws her hands up in as much frustration as someone as polite and gentle as her can muster. "I don't think that would ever happen."_

_Shepard can only smile as she finishes the last sip of a coffee too strong for her. Chief Durante often brews the coffee with his sleeping schedule, if only by fluke. Always dark, black as all hell. He doesn't even like it but it's the only way he knows how to drink the stuff._

_"We don't even know what a Reaper is." She lies. She knows what it is, she just can't say or else she would sacrifice her sanity, much like Saren. "I'm gonna get more coffee. I'd like to hash out if there are any sites around where the Protheans were actively preparing for war."_

_When she steps out onto the crew deck, she is met with a rare sight: Chief Durante and Chief Gul alone on the mess table. Shepard's stealth training doesn't fail her as she takes one step out, only to see their backs. JD and Mai are in their duty uniforms, but no armor, just what they wore about the ship, dressed down. Mai, given her still fresh beating and wounds, forgoes her armor, but her techsuit is applied beneath her clothing._

_JD is sitting on the table, omni out, reading some sort of article with C-SEC emblazoned on the top. Mai is walking back from the table where the Normandy's meager selection of foodstuffs and food preparing devices are. The steam that rolls out from around her hints at what she carries, but it's immediately seen: White mugs, filled with the coffee she also sought out. One for her, and sitting right next to JD, one for him._

_He looks up at her as he sees the coffee cup in surprise. It's a very odd cue for her to sit right next to him. Though she doesn't know any better._

_Shepard can't see her face, but she sees their hands._

_JD's right hand goes flat vertically, touching his chin before gesturing toward her._

_It's the most basic of ASL: THANK YOU. Shepard only knows because everyone is exposed to that sign as a fun fact at some point. She knows no sign language outside of the military standard, and so she is deaf as Mai's right hand, with a more calculated, rigid movement compared to JD, reciprocates in a maneuver she can't make heads or tails of._

_The Commander can't see her face, but she can see JD's, and she sees the warm smile radiate off of it._

Cleft-lip smiles his broken smile. "We have no further insight to that particular aspect of their social relation, if you're curious, however at the very face of that detail, yes, Chief Durante is imprinted upon Chief Gul."

Shepard blinks a few times as she takes in how Cleft-lip spoke about Chief Gul. "She's not an animal."

Cleft-lip nods. "No… But you know by now that she isn't entirely Human, as you or me."

Vice Admiral Nguyen and Admiral Drescher share a look. If they had ten divisions of soldiers that the UNSC had, if they had ten divisions of soldiers like JD, the ODST, or even just a cadre of Spartans, the Alliance's problems in the galaxy would've been over very soon.

Mai might've been Cerberus, might've been less than friendly to Shepard, but she was still her crew. She deserved to be stood up for… and yet…

Hackett adjusts his coat as he bellows out words, carefully, with command. "Given your history with Cerberus, we thought it… pertinent that they keep this part of their history classified, even from you. To protect them, **from you**."

Shepard flew to her feet, flew to her fists before the admirals of the Alliance. "I would **never **hurt my people. Not if they don't deserve it."

"History says otherwise."

Shepard knew exactly what Hackett had referred to exactly, hand out, finger pointed. "They were guilty as sin! **Cerberus dogs! All of them**!" Shepard's voice, her legendary voice and candor, the voice that could save planets, save lives, it was ragged. Their point was proven, and Hackett nailed it in:

"But you didn't know that at the time. You just lined them up against their vehicle and gunned them down. That was the call you made, is it not? To kill people that were innocent, not proven guilty by a court of law?" Sunglasses stands up, and Shepard realizes that the two of them, the two intel agents, they were of her measure. She was not the only N7 in this galaxy. "You wanted the truth well there it is, Commander. Now what are you going to do with it?" Shepard, she holds the bottom of her face with a palm, glazed over eyes staring at a glass table as Sunglasses goes on with an intensity that she only imagines is the type she puts out. "They don't need to be your friends for them to be what you need them to be. You have their **_loyalty_**."

It's the loyalty engrained in every soldier, in every call of duty. The oath to blood by the rite of battle, passed down from generation to generation in the name of being a man-at-arms.

No favor needed to be asked, no deed needed to be done. It was the understanding between soldiers to each other that there was a bond.

Chief Gul and Chief Durante were soldiers.

* * *

It's reminiscent of a super stadium. JD knows the type. Many militias in the colonies were often called to them in order to organize or evacuate the planet from. This dome is big enough to hide perhaps the largest secret of this galaxy, equal to them:

UNSC Frigate FFG-371.

**The Savannah.**

They stand on solid ground in the middle of an ocean, essentially a superstructure of a rig, supporting the weight of the debris of the Savannah, arranged as if a car from an accident for investigators to see what went wrong. It's hidden behind security checkpoints from exactly one entry way: the line in and out making the traffic above pale in comparison. Even with Sara's VIPs, it takes them long enough to return to where it began:

The Savannah towers over all, but beneath the lights of the giant steel dome above, the only shadow is that directly below it.

She broke up in three parts Mai remembers as she fought through the Covenant frigate; only now she is told that its name was the _Ardent Prayer_. She couldn't disable the guns in time and instead saw it break apart as they fought through gunnery. Midship and then by the engine, the Savannah is laid out, upright, held up by scaffolding, the busy bees of Alliance scientists and engineers picking through and studying it.

It was a crime scene in all but name beneath harsh, bright, artificial lighting that goes against everything she knows about natural illumination. Sterile is the word she uses.

"There's been an issue with the Savannah." Sara starts, looking up at it. "We've been analyzing and trying to see if any of it is worth studying and reverse engineering: mostly composite sciences and, of course, its propulsion systems, however the ship has proven far sturdier than we expected. That's why you're here mostly."

The two nod, sharing nothing behind their helmets as they look up at the Savannah as if in dry dock.

There are buildings in that giant steel space: warehouses.

Sara points to each one as workers pass by them, each in its own corner, gesturing, raising her voice above the noise of machinery and people.

"We have several of the Savannah's surviving components salvaged and kept: The MAC gun is over there, fusion drive there, along with the nukes."

For a moment, as Sara says familiar terminologies in the shadow of a UNSC warship, JD and Mai believe to be home. It was an impressive sight: just to see a recovered UNSC warship at all, so cleanly put down.

Wherever there is a flat surface not meant for transportation or walk ways, tarps and stands have been put up, science stations and recorders all looking at pieces of what fell from orbit as if it had been a museum. Immediately JD and Mai peg some of them in that massive space: the Pelican they rode in on was recovered, put behind glass with hazmat suited individuals still swabbing away at it. Hard cases and gear, pieces of debris deemed important, all of it is put to steel and picked apart as if it was new. To the Chiefs it hadn't, but for the Alliance it had been the results of a Humanity nearly three hundred years in the future.

Out of curiosity's sake JD can do only one thing as he looks at a ship made into a tomb: click the side of his helmet and activate VISR mode.

Anything that came from his universe, it outlines green; even Mai.

Sara is behind the two chiefs, and they turn around, heads both tilted asking a question. The researcher Ryder can only raise her hand up and hail up transport.

Four wheels, tusks, a loud engine and a louder presence on the battlefield that put even Scorpions to shame (even with a Scorpion out in its own capsule, being studied below the Savannah).

It pulls up to them like old poetry, and suddenly the Chiefs are aware that there are half a dozen present, just carting gear and personnel around that place. It's a guilty pleasure at the very least to see the main combat vehicle of the UNSC roll up, a galaxy away, and still work as intended. It's not a turreted version, just a troop transporter.

"I believe these were designated by the UNSC as the M12 FAV?"

No one knew it by that name in the UNSC. Even Mai called it this, corrected, as she looked at its tow winches up front:

**"Warthog."**

It is the Spartan in her that makes her move to commandeer it immediately, the driver rolling up disembarking and offering it fully to them as he walks toward the exit to end his shift, however a tap against her wrist stops that.

It's JD, a fist held out.

_Oh._

She fists up as well, and three pumps later it's scissor against paper.

JD's shoulders slumps having lost, but he's just fine with shotgun as Mai circles around. The old motions take over, hopping into the driver's seat of a Warthog. Between the two of them, there were many things that they had left behind in their old lives: many things that they thought they'd never do again. For JD, it was dropping in a pod, feeling the burn of biofoam, or reloading actual magazines. For Mai, it was getting behind the targeting unit of a "Spartan Laser", or using an armor module that hadn't been her active camo.

In the shadow of the Savannah though, they were able to relive the feeling of riding in a Warthog, as ridiculously cathartic as it was. Mai getting in had made the signature suspension of the vehicle spring, and, if they closed their eyes, they could very much pretend that they had met in a different circumstance: Maybe it was a battlefield on Reach where Mai had to take a Warthog for transport and JD just so happened to be in shotgun. That was the normal way they might've met.

But that wasn't a friendship, and that far in, they both would each come to the conclusion they preferred what they were now.

It's Mai thinking as JD patiently teaches her sign language that she's glad it was him that fell out of the sky with her.

She's glad that JD is the person he is; that he isn't just the green and mean jarhead expected of him by the Marines.

For JD, he laments the thought that Mai might've gone her whole life, even a whole natural life, without being understood. He laments that every Spartan might've been lonely like her.

He's glad that he's there, even on distant battlefields, witnessing her tear limb from synthetic limb.

"I hear from the Covenant," Sara clambers into the back, and even the feeling of people getting into the Warthog triggers something within the two chiefs. "That these vehicles were known for their durability and off-road handling."

Warthogs alone are one of the things Mai can, with some effort, throw at the enemy and not have it break as well. She agrees.

"I'd take this over the Mako." It's a rare comment from Mai as she feels the vehicle purr and she holds her hands to its wheel, the dashboard reading a-okay. Apparently, the Alliance had been able to service and fuel a small fleet of Hogs.

"Why are we using these?" JD hangs his arm around the back of his seat, craning his neck.

All Sara can do is pat the frame of it, and, despite the creaking, the Warthog is a-okay. "Honestly, we've learned all we can from the Warthogs, and it's not really anything we haven't already sorted out in our own engineering. However, a good amount of them survived the destruction that we were able to use them. Which is good, the Council would raise eyebrows if we started shipping out heavy duty gear out here."

"Are you thinking about any reverse engineering or anything?" It's been on JD's mind ever since they had come here, and in that breath it's hard not to think of more Mais in Alliance getup. The Spartan herself is distant, tracing her hands over the Warthog as if savoring memories. In truth: she is, just feeling UNSC gear again.

Sara rolls her head around, noncommittal. "The Admiralty has, for the most part, put a wait and see on that topic. Now, if you could follow the guide posts we're going to the _morgue_."

The warmth in both of them melted away with the realization, that, of course, they were the only **living** survivors.

* * *

The Chiefs aren't the only subject that is debriefed in that room in the admirals. After them it is business as usual: the performance of the Normandy, the advisement that it is being upgraded, along with status reports about Saren and Alliance issues up and down the Attican. Past the nastiness of the Chiefs Shepard still proves herself as the Alliance's top asset out among the stars, and it is only because of that she remains with the Normandy despite staring down the Admiralty all for the sake of knowing two people.

Though she still hazards one last thing before they leave the room, her hand clamped with Hackett's as they depart from that room off to the business that traps them in that galaxy. "Despite all the trouble having Chief Durante and Chief Gul with me, you would still have them on my roster?"

Hackett nods immediately with an earnest dip she feels. "They're worth it, and you're worth it, Commander… They're not bad people. You have my word on that."

"I believe you." Shepard says, releasing her hand from the handshake. She does believe that they are good people. She believes that in everyone, just on principle, even with Mai. Her brutal, cold, calculated killing isn't personal. She knows better what it looks like when the killing becomes personal.

She has a lot to think about the Chiefs now, knowing the hidden parts of them. It'd make sense why they did, knowing her, back off. She killed Cerberus with the imposition of a crusade, and now they served with her. She understood that. And perhaps she understood Mai just a little more knowing why she was how she was: trained by Cerberus as a killing machine.

More was waiting for her in a forwarded report of course, but she had more to attend to on Altis: like family.

"Oh, Commander, I don't suppose you've met the Prophet of Destiny yet?" Her right eye twitches as Hackett asks her, and she makes no note of it.

"We briefly shook hands at the Citadel in Udina's office."

"Well stand by for a moment, he comes around every week for a briefing with us."

She is more than enthusiastic upon hearing those words. Of course, she would love to, so she nods, very much noticing that the rest of the room still remained, minus the intelligence agents who had walked up and off to "stretch their legs".

It would be nice to hear something about the Covenant that hadn't been through a report or a screen, and, quite frankly, the moment she had with Destiny on the Citadel had been her next approximation of what it was like to meet an alien Pope.

It honored her then, and she felt it would honor her now.

Shepard waits, and she reads reports and updates from the other crew:

Ashley was offered a transfer to another Marine unit on Altis, but she has denied it.

Kaiden is back on the Normandy still, going over gear checklists and deliveries about the Normandy's refit.

Wrex is… sleeping.

Garrus and Liara are both planetside on Altis, in the very city, it's their first shore leave and, given that Hitman's shore leave might be a bit too intense for them, they go together to find some sort of relaxation.

_JShep: This planet is 90% beach. I'm sure you'll find something!_

_GVak: Oh yeah. I'm very relaxed, especially when there's C-Sec on the ground, I can't tell the stars from the ships overhead, and this is my first time alone in a Human colony._

_JShep: Liara, get him drunk. My tab!_

_LT'Soni: OK._

It's not the best first impression: Shepard's face in a grimace as she observes Liara's lack of texting etiquette, though she's first to her feet as the doors to the conference room open and in floats, backed by a procession of brutish guards, the Prophet of Destiny.

San'Shyuum is the name that they give the Galaxy, but they prefer another, translated out. It's the name used by every Covenant race: Prophet.

In red robes, a crown of ivy tops the worm, bulbous head of Destiny. He is, for all intents and purposes, the Leader of the Covenant.

"Admiral Hackett." Hackett is first to greet the Prophet at the door as the Brute and Elite guards filter in by the walls, blazing red armor with glassy outlines of yellow: the Honor Guard.

Any excitement and jubilation and curiosity within Shepard dissolves when they come, and she can't quite understand why. The very first time she met an Asari she was grinning, from ear to ear, and the Asari had thought her mad for it. Though she meant that smile. Here she fought to keep it as her eyes kept darting to the guards, their weapons, the voice of Hackett and Destiny droning out as she feels her very skin begin to burn and her forehead begin to sweat.

She tells herself it's just the soldier in her: that's why she needs to loosen the neck of her armor and the feeling of claustrophobia is creeping up to her like quicksand.

She can't focus, looking at Destiny, seeing what appears to be nothing but a benign old(?) leader make small talk with Hackett as the rest of the Humans in the room seem relatively lax. The pikes that the Honor Guard hold seem to grow taller, shadows deepening as, all at once, the room comes in on her as Hackett gestures to Shepard and speaks words she cannot hear.

Destiny looks her, up and down, recognizing her from the Citadel.

The gravity chair that Destiny is in floats towards her and something happens in her head that she has never experienced before as Destiny reaches out a hand and the part of her that isn't losing her shit reciprocates shakily.

Time slows.

A moment turns into a minute. She can see the world in ultra-clarity but she can't move her body all the same. It's like she's trapped: staring dead right into the eyes of a Prophet. Trapped in her own body it feels like it takes an hour for her hand to meet his long, wringly one, and clasp.

Her hand burns beneath the glove and time comes crashing back down along with all her mind.

She had shook his hand with all the respect and interest as she could garner as she comes from a high she had never known, even in battle: She was beyond curious and willing to learn about the Covenant, though she had a galaxy to save. But now, here? She felt her blood boil, sick to her stomach. She knew immediately that if she had kept touching his hand, she would've broken it. She wanted a knife, so badly. Two of them, one for each hand, to slice up his flesh and cast him to the floor and to watch him bleed out and die.

She wanted to proceed to slash the jaws off of the Elite, crush the skull of the Grunts. She wanted to kill them all.

For all her animosity against Cerberus she had never felt this kinda of pure, blinding, poisonous and acidic rage through her veins before.

It was as if she had held it all her life.

Destiny opens his mouth and he says something to her. She can't hear it, despite everything. She tries so hard to just _be _normal, to pass it off, but she can't.

Her lip quivered as she looked at the Prophet's open, long, stringy hand and her eyes went dry just staring at it, taking him in. She tasted blood in the back of her throat as, all at once, she beat back a scream and turned away. She ran.

For the first time since she was just a girl, she ran away, she fled. Her body wanted to do something but if she acquiesced, she would've killed every single alien on that planet. It wasn't a vague guess; it was exactly what she knew what she wanted to do.

She had never wanted to kill more in her life. It would've been so easy to cut off its head, put a knife through its back.

She knew exactly how to do it too.

But how?!

Two different autopilots fight for her body, and she lets them take her for her sake.

"I'm sorry, I **_have _**to go." Shepard blurts out.

She feels the burning so hot behind her eyes she has to shut them and hang her head down as she rushes out of the conference room, the building, out to nowhere, her body on its own devices as she feels the Altis street below her. When she opens her eyes, she finds herself chest to chest with a Jiralhanae, looking down on her confused.

She knows what they look like, fur signed with napalm, throats open, hearts ripped out.

Shoving the Brute asides, she hears it roar at her annoyed, but it phases out of her memory as all around her she sees Covenant. She sees invasion, and her hands forcefully take her rifle in her hand and she almost screams in horror as she does it. Throwing her guns down to the street with all her will power she instead finds a dark place: an alleyway.

_Oh god, not an alleyway._

It's a cacophony as the sounds of Kodiaks and mass effect drives are replaced by the humming of Covenant transports and their energy generation. She wants to go to them with a grenade to make them all stop but they're everywhere.

Everywhere. They're coming for the colonies, they're coming for every Human in every planet. They want to burn her so completely that her bones will be ash, and the ground beneath her will be glass and she wants to do something about it but that something is a million million dead and she knows that she is not a woman of genocide. Can she end a genocide by committing genocide? It drives her mad to even think that that question is able to be answered by her as a violin string played by a razer is in her ear and a diamond bullet is in her hand.

She wants to load it into a gun and put the gun in her mouth and she wants to blow her own brains out because of the pure, unbearable hate, the memories of violence, that exist within it.

The end of the world, the Reapers, they do not compare to something she realizes has come from a Human.

Her breaths become grunts, groans, and she speaks like a feral woman from Humanity's first days. There is no language able to reconcile her suffering into word; so she puts herself in a dark place, right next to a dumpster and she tucks herself in and she fights a heart of darkness battling for her soul.

Of all the gods and faiths she begs to help her, she hazes over the names of Buddha, of Allah. They're there, inside of her, implanted. Ideas, teachings, beliefs said by distant tongues for comfort.

_innaLillahiwainnailayhiraji'unsamsararebirthbornagainashestoashesdusttodust_

"Easy there, Spectre." A female voice, her shoulder touched upon. Older, world-knowing. A certain viscosity to it that was that of a smooth woman.

Another voice. "It would make all of us look bad if you kicked it so early into your career."

Shepard concentrated on the touch, finding herself. "What's it to you?" She croaks out. She recognized the Turian flange, even between the heartbeat in her head and the panting, though she couldn't bare to bring her head up yet, too heavy. She didn't have a choice as she felt three fingers tip her head up to see three aliens look down upon her. Three different aliens, but familiar. More familiar than the Covenant. She felt her breath return to her as she centered herself, trying to beat back the hate. One at a time, they introduced themselves.

"_Tela Vasir_. Special Tactics and Recon." An Asari, combat armor and all with a pistol on her hip, purple face markings like a Turian. War paint. In her hands are Shepard's pistol and rifle, dropped and recovered.

More face paint on the Turian to her side, an upside-down V piercing through his eyes up to his forehead. "_Avitus Rix_, uh, same. Also apologies for when you last heard me, Shepard." He was a bit squeamish for good reason. He had spoken his heart out for his mentor: Saren, speaking to his innocence against Shepard.

He lost for it.

And the last one, a white and red Salarian medical uniform over his body, a biometric collar around his neck. He had been the one that touched her head up, and he had removed it respectfully as he gave a genuine smile down.

"**Mordin Solus**, Commander Shepard. Have heard a great deal about you recently. And before that too as well. Come. Have set up a clinic here. Probably best in planet, but don't mean to gloat."

* * *

It wasn't until her third tour after Elysium that she had the actual pleasure of associating with aliens outside of shooting them. Shepard had met those in the N program training, she had read the words of Drack and those like him, and had been tempted by an Asari or too on shore leave even within Human space. So she was not unfamiliar with the other inhabitants of the galaxy.

She had not much experience with Salarians however, and, as Avitus had been more than willing to warn her as he steadied her into an office, they warned her Mordin Solus was not a typical example of either a doctor or a Salarian.

The Doctor, Professor, general structural nuisance, Mordin Solus has, since Covenant landfall, maintained a small office in a two story building by Alliance HQ, meant to provide urgent care at the behest of the many Council organizations on the scene in Altis. He is, by all means, just a private practitioner who wants to just help the strangers that are the Covenant. Payment comes in the form of the many questions he bombards upon them.

For some that is a price to big to give, even to someone who is a top tier medical professional.

He is that, but, given the fact that two Spectres are with him today, basically carrying the feral body of the newest, it would be a fair guess to any that it wasn't the only thing he was.

With hands who have killed far more than she has, Tela Vasir and Avitus Rix, Asari and Turian Spectre respectively, strip Shepard's armor off of her as she is laid in a benign medical bed in an office. Shepard can't help but remember her childhood physician in her hazy state. She feels like falling back into the state she was after Feros, but she fights it, and with two Spectres over her and a doctor she is able to stay relatively lucid.

Down to her duty uniform Mordin scans her over with his Omni, Tela pressing a cold towel to her head as Avitus just stands by.

Solus, with all the bedside manner as befit a doctor like him, raises his equivlent of an eyebrow over his black beady eyes at the readings he gets from the omni. "Heightened adrenaline levels within system. Odd. Were you fighting within the last ten minutes?"

"No, doctor." Shepard croaks out.

Avitus can only sniff at the smell of the room. "You definitely smell like you were just in the thick of it."

"Didn't need to know that." Shepard's grit is still there, and she has to. It keeps her there, present, as the Asari Spectre pats her head with a towel. If it wasn't for the fact she recognized Avitus she would've been yelling out she was being kidnapped and drugged.

It's not far off from the truth, but it's all in good nature.

Allies helping allies.

"I thought Spectres usually work alone?" The Commander cranes her neck up and her body feels heavy like steel. Tela doesn't fight it though, she knows the Commander is tough enough, dignified enough, to prop herself up on her arms as her hair is slick with sweat and she tries to keep up who she is in the face of whatever just happened to her.

Solus had moved back to the wall-side countertop of the room before anyone answered, in a blurry mess of drawers opening and closing, he had poured exacting amounts of powder into a small set up tool with a funnel. It was apparent after he had taken out the molding: compacting a pill in plain view with his press, depressing his thumb on the grip as a hydraulic whine was heard until it settled. The pill revealed, he had swiped it up, giving it to Shepard with a glass of water. "Take this. Painkiller and internal temporary hormone stabilizer. Based off of epinephrine. Should help calm visceral functions down to standard levels at rest until you can maintain normally."

She was never one for pills at all. Too many risks of either complications with her Biotic implant or just plain haziness. She hadn't even the daily application that most women knew very well: birth control. Her body, for all that it had gone through, didn't need it anymore.

Here though, in this situation, she could make an exception, taking it quickly and swallowing the pill dry, without water.

"Thank you, doctor." Maybe it was the damning psychological effect of just taking a pill, but she felt better immediately, even before she felt the water settle in her gut, bringing herself into a sit on the bed.

"Mordin is fine." The Salarian politely answered. There had been about five places to sit in that room but he had remained standing, arms behind his back.

"As for your question…" Tela started, leaning back in her own chair, glancing at the Turian in the room. "Well, technically I'm here supervising Avitus as he supervises the Alliance supervising the Covenant and the Quarians… But you know I'm sure you can see how painfully unnecessary that all is."

Shepard had thoughtfully tapped Avitus's forearm armor as she gestured for him, garnering his attention, head down as Tela spoke. He seemed young. Younger than Garrus. "I'm sorry you were put in that position. Is something going to happen to you?"

Avitus's mandibles clicked a few times before he shook his head. "I've been shamed in front of the galactic community, Shepard. That's rough for someone who's supposed to work in the shadows."

She blinked, wondering what it was like to be a galactic nobody. It would've been nice. "Still, I'm sorry."

Sharply he breathed in air, shaking his head, shaking it off. "You're not Saren. Don't apologize for what he's done to all of us."

There wasn't much more Shepard could say to that, but still, she was just whipped up in a whole storm of something. There was no reason she should've reacted like that with Destiny; she had never had murder on her mind like that. She had _never _lost control.

More pressing, immediately however. "How'd you find me?"

Tela's very figure was that of a commando, comfortable in all places, even here: leaned in her stool with squinted eyes, appraising Shepard in ways that the Commander remembered from Nihlus. Shepard could immediately imagine her thumbing one of JD's cigarettes as she sat still, willing her tight lips to answer.

"We knew you were on planet, and we figure we just link up at some point. Seems like we just caught you at the right time."

"Huh, right. Well, good call." The admittance in Shepard's voice was that of embarrassment, running her hand through her hair. At some point her bun had gotten dislodged, her auburn red hair cascading past her shoulders. For as rough and tumble as she was known as, and she had known that image well, her distinctive hair bun had run against that. It was a low bun, simply a ponytail wrapped around itself. It was a hint of elegance that she had picked up in the academy. Perhaps it was just her way of telling herself she was older now, not the earth wanderer she had been, but it was a "look", as many military and civilian tabloids would report.

"You gonna tell us what was that?" Avitus prods, and for once she remembers that she isn't always the one asking questions. "That could've gotten really dicey."

She takes the time to put her hair back into a bun first, buying her time to find something that makes sense. Though if she had been able to do that, she might've been able to convince the Council that the Reapers had actually been a threat.

It's something to do with that though. She knows it in her bones now. She is well acquainted with horror enough to know where it comes from within her, and what just happened, that episode she just had, it rubbed up along with it.

"It's this shit inside of my head." She finally answers to a waiting crowd. "That Prothean Beacon."

They know what she's talking about. The entire galaxy does. "You still fit?" Tela asks, and Solus is already running another scan of her down to answer for everyone. "You shouldn't have gone out on this mission if something like that was going to factor in."

"No, no," She almost swats Tela away with that, head in her hands, as if putting it back on her neck. "I'm fine. I'm learning to deal with it. It's just the Covenant, they came around, really shocked me."

"Hm." Avitus noted. "Well, I don't suppose we're not all in the best mood to talk about the mission then, eh?"

"That what you wanted to do with me?"

Avitus nods, eyes avoiding Shepard's. Shame is the same in every culture. "I… I feel like I owe you. I owe it to Nihlus, and for Saren, to help."

Tela is less than graceful, but there is a little empathy in it. She brushes off her armor's shoulder, the aggressive white chevron of the Spectres on it. She was more of a commando compared to the diplomats of the Spectres. "And I'm the poor bastard who has to watch him for it…"

Shepard only wondered what she could be: between two scales. What did the galaxy need?

It's not for her to really decide, not now, not as her head pounds and she tries to dig her palms through her forehead to massage. "I got a headache, anyways, I don't think it'd be well if you two start cramming stuff in there more."

Headache. The word spurs Mordin from his quiet observation to again waving his omni over Shepard. "Interesting."

She really ought to have asked more questions as to who Mordin was at all, but she feels safe with him. The doctors of her life are of a certain character, and although Mordin bares the scars of an interesting life on his face, there's a warm smile on it all the same. A man doing his life's work is a man fulfilled.

"What'd you do Doc?" She asks, controlling her breathing, trying to bring herself down to the ground.

"Ran a quick neurograpahic scan." His tongue is blazing fast, barely sparing a breath to explain.

A brain analysis, if she remembered correctly. "Ah don't bother, my ship's doctor already ran something like that."

In his big black eyes reflect data from her head, and he tries to take it all in, his voice measured, but intelligent. "And did she note that there was over 50% increase of acetylcholine in your temporal lobe?"

She wasn't an egghead, trying to hold onto the words out of his mouth before they drifted away. "Uh, yeah, something like that. She said it was normal, in regards to someone like me interfacing with a Prothean artifact… I had a second opinion as well." Liara, that is.

"Do you know what such an increase indicates however?"

"No?"

"Simply put this corresponding increase of a neurotransmitter in that particular part of your brain corresponds with a rapid intake of information… _memories_."

For a second, she doesn't have a headache. She only has clarity. "What?" Shepard blinks, eyes wide.

"Correct. Such accumulation means that you've had an awful lot to think about, and from my regard, even in your position, this is highly irregular. Even equivalent cases for Salarians not as high. Even with less life to live but just as much to take in." Putting his hands to his chin, really looking at Shepard, all he could say was this. "Surprised your head has not exploded."

"Feels like it's going to though…"

"Don't doubt it. How long are you here on Altis?"

She could estimate. "Few days, why?"

"Opening a clinic on Omega after this, giving back to the galaxy where it needs most. Would be obliged to have you be my first patient here, before I get set up in the Terminus."

Mordin Solus. She commits that name to memory. She needs allies in this galaxy, and he seems like one.

"I'll," In a flash, in a blur, it's another intricacy of her life added. "I'll think about it, Mordin."

"The good doctor, professor rather, knows a thing or two." Avitus points out, almost bemoaning the fact. "It's why we'd let him get within five feet of you."

The doctor finally puts his omni down, arms up, feigning accusation. "Have done work for the Council before. All friends here. Promise on both my medical and dramatic career."

"Dramatic?"

"Theatre. One does have to have hobbies in the lines of work we come from. Avitus?" Mordin gestured at the Turian.

"I tune weapons, got my own shop some seasons back on Palaven." He admitted.

_What was it about Turians and calibrating weapons?_

Mordin shrugs, shaking his head as he looks at Tela and she doesn't even need to vocalize that she wouldn't answer. "Unfortunately, not as fun, but understandable. Point is, you need to relax. Are you familiar with Altis?"

Fun for her was being alone with nature, the world, where no one knew her name and the galaxy left her alone. Though that was selfish. She got the point however. If she had been born a different hair color perhaps, she would've been greying already.

She was thirty in a few months, and what did she have to show for it? A few lives lived and a billion more on her shoulders.

"Not really but… Hey, I'm going to eat dinner with my parents later. I'd be happy if you all joined. You know, maybe share Spectre stories? Convince Mom and Dad this job isn't _that _exciting. I've only got one and it's this one I'm currently trying to hash out... That and if I have an episode you'll cart me away all secret like."

The facial twitch, held out by Avitus as he considered was quite a look. Shepard had known Garrus to hold the same when he was considering a particularly awkward thought. It made sense: this was probably an awkward question. "Eh, we really can't tell, given the nature of our trade, but… I dunno. You down Tela?"

That she was amiable toward. "Sure? I mean, Doctor Solus, you coming?"

Mordin glances at his omni's clock. "It'd be rude to reject. It is after hours here in this office anyhow, and personally not too excited to go back to the Citadel residency building the Alliance has set up."

"Oh? Why?"

Mordin shrugged. "Too many people who don't know what they are doing. Pitiful, really."

It was like a bad joke what transpired later at that dinner: Three Shepards, three Spectres, and a Doctor walk in a bar, and, only half an hour later, a _Ryder_.

"Hey! What kept you?" Shepard greets her at the door to lead her to the resturaunt's table.

"Oh, nothing big." Sara smiles in returning, hiding the turmoil about how she could save her mother with what she had just learned today from the Chiefs.

* * *

The cold. They feel it.

The ODST BDU is supposed to be able to withstand EVA-scenarios and environments with aplomb: the actual frost of space.

The MJOLNIR Mark V is also, similarly able to maintain a constant body temperature negating any thermal effects against its wearers.

Despite this, Mai and JD feel the cold as they walk into that metal box of a warehouse, housing the bodies of those that remained.

Of the 500-man compliment of the Savannah, only eighty bodies were ever recovered from the wreck. The rest vaporized or spaced over Reach.

It is the first time JD or Mai has ever known the Covenant to return bodies. Mai can't help but fear a pang of righteous anger to it however: the bodies that they returned had been from the Ardent Prayer. Marines that had died during Operation Uppercut, and of them, ODSTs.

JD's squad.

They pass by their caskets, actual caskets, their faces greyed, but still whole. It is a freezer there, and the bodies are months old, but the tech to keep them presentable is something the Alliance has mastered by way of Mass Effect fields.

Mishka Trotsky. ODST engineer. She welded the doors of the Ardent Prayer shut, keeping the troop compartments away from the operation space. She died when an Elite put a sword through her back. JD saw it happen: that same Elite kicked him onto the floor and put its boot on his chest threatening to do the same. He secretly adored her Slavic accent, and she was prideful of the fact that she had been a Slav.

Al O'Hara. Squad leader. JD didn't know him or the squad long, but long enough to know O'Hara had been through enough squads to mix up names of those long dead. His face was at peace as they passed his body.

All of them are ODSTs like him.

"His body is over here." Sara's breath frosts in the air as they arrive at the reason, they subjected themselves to this grim reminder of another war: the one they left.

There, despite the cold, Mai observes JD carry out tradition out of respect. His helmet is off, and he holds it close to his heart. It is the constant of his life that he alone sees the dead, caused by a Covenant. He knows the motion well and how to process it: He burns their memories into his mind and hopes he can live up to them, even if he knows he probably can't.

The only identification the Alliance has are the dog tags, though there is another way as Mai adjusts her helmet's HUD for a moment as they approach the casket labeled Jens.

As she clicks the setting into place, the room goes alight for her with red Xs and names. Their IFF chips still worked, and eighty names appeared before Mai, all of them that of the dead.

Dead men tell no tales, as many sailors say, but the UNSC sometimes subverted it.

There are still some secrets which Mai and JD keep, and of those, the chips in the back of their heads is one of them. "In your reports, you don't make mention to this."

JD vaguely passed his hand by the back of his head. They slipped the chip that Ryder had documented in all UNSC personnel in some way or another shortly after his initial buzzcut. It was a little less significant than getting a wisdom tooth out (or technically, in). He started out as a grunt and wasn't given the complex package that Captain Jens had. When he became an ODST there was an option for another sensory package that, in some way, was supposed to suppress certain neural pathways regarding the fear of falling, as was said to him. He didn't take it, if only because his increased sleeping tendencies started after that first procedure.

For the regular UNSC military grunt, they were biologically internalized IFF chips that flagged a user as friendly on UNSC motion trackers that most UNSC grunts had via their helmet interfaces.

"It's because I've reported no such thing, Ryder."

Mai's neural lace, it is something far bigger than people assume. Even when JD sees it through her hair, he stares. It's a metal, claw like plug, not insignificant in size, sitting at the bottom slope of her head. Not that anyone would try, but if one looked into its slit, perfectly able to interface with her helmet, one would've seen the inside of Mai's brain.

She was always the test subject, the deniable asset, so the first time she had come to Reach it had been to test the Spartan neural interface. It was meant for many things, and one of them included integrating, if needed, with the neural lace given to all captains of the UNSC.

The temperature of this warehouse and the freezer like conditions of the coffin had kept his body relatively, disregarding that it was spaced, intact and whole. His eyes were closed, peaceful. A young captain, but most captains of UNSC frigates never tended to stay that way. The lines on his face that were starting to form by the time of Operation Uppercut was testament to that. He was no older than forty.

"Did you know him?" Mai nudged JD as her hand drifted near her belt holster, they both coming to the side of his open casket. Distantly, cameras watched on, but even the studious Alliance would not touch the dead. The UNSC were still very much Human.

He shook his head. He was posted to the Savannah for less than a month before the Covenant came to Reach, and, unsurprisingly, he spent his time sleeping.

Mai turned her gaze to Sara quickly. "I've done this before."

JD's not squeamish. He's seen people's heads blown off and grenades pop off inside bodies, though even he can't help but turn away as soon as his mind processes what Mai is doing with a knife as she turns Jens' body over, puts the blade at the back of his head and presses down with a swiftness only a Spartan could be known for.

Sara half-squeaks as the sound of skin and bone cracking come, like raw chicken being prepped, though Mai is cleaner than that. There's no blood in the bodies, the Alliance personnel have made note to exhume, however what has remained is implanted in the skull of Captain Jens, now retrieved as Mai yanks out, with a moist crack, a chip connected to a metallic tail, bits of flesh still on it. She barely gains her composure to write notes as Mai takes the chip from the tail, placing the tail back into Jens' coffin, and puts it into a port in the side of her helmet.

As soon as she does a command prompt runs at the top of her HUD:

UNSC/ FFG-371 COMMAND CODES/REGISTERED: CAPN KRISTOF JEN/STATE: DECEASED

…

DETECTED:

**LIEUTENANT**

**SIERRA BRAVO 312**

AUTHENTICATE COMMAND:

Y/N?

For some prompts, all she needed to do was think the answer. Saying yes as she did, she has become the provisional captain of the UNSC Savannah.

"Did it work?" Sara asks, unsure if she wants to know the answer.

Mai looks down at JD first before she answers. His HUD buzzes momentarily before adjusting, the rank which it displayed Mai at, her tag still remaining as SIX after all that time, is changed. It now designates her as captain.

Who was he but a good Marine to not salute his captain, and he did, a flick of his hand at his forehead.

Behind her helmet she didn't stop the smile as she turned to Sara and nodded. "Get me to the bridge."

* * *

Walking the halls of a UNSC ship is a shock in a direction that they've been feeling heavily ever since they arrived at the site. Researchers and engineers looking on in awe as the prodigal soldiers, the prodigal UNSC members, return. It stops their work, but Sara, apparently research leader despite her calm and lax demeanor, glances at them, urging them to work on.

For JD it's like yesterday as the halls, cleaned down from explosive residue and powered up somehow, reveal the inside of a type of ship he never thought he'd step foot in again. As long as they hadn't been near any of the zones of the ship that had been blasted away, it was as if the Savannah was good for space duty.

The ship, its doors, its very systems recognize them as UNSC members as they all react as they've known to for all of JD and Mai's lives. They open automatically, whereas for the Alliance they have to manually open and close them.

Sara is busy writing such a reaction when they turn the corner into the command deck. There is another place which JD wants to visit if he is allowed: the ODST deck, but they are at the Savannah for a very pointed reason. That focus only is betrayed as they find, before them, Covenant.

The fires burn and the engines within them kick up as they see that that particular Covenant is none other than a Hunter and an Engineer, fitting in those utilitarian halls.

Where there was one Hunter, there was two.

It's not a Hunter form that the two soldiers know as they immediately go for their guns and, just short of aiming, tense up.

No distinctive cannon, no spiked backs, much less armor, though no less imposing and interfacing with a system console mid-hall as the Engineer, floating, makes a high-pitched chirping sound. One of its tentacles pokes one of the Hunter's plated shoulders, its "hands" acting like a hundred fingers against the UNSC console as it spies the Spartan and the ODST. The Engineer ducks behind the Hunter as another emerges from the other side, the brutish grunting that they communicate in hoarse and confrontational, like concrete being ground as Sara puts her foot down.

"Hey!" There's bite in that yell.

What the Chiefs don't know is that she is very much like Shepard. She too is a soldier, once fighting over Prothean dig sites from pirates and raiders.

Being here is a punishment for her.

"I thought we were over this." She grits.

She doesn't understand. Not many people would. Mai and JD take to the sides of the halls as again they beat back the call to action, and the Hunters curl as if readying themselves to charge like a bull, the worm colonies that they are rolling over themselves like waves.

It's the hallway just before the bridge of the Savannah, and from the bridge two forms step out: One Human, one Elite.

The Elite's blue armor filters well against the blue armored coat of the Alliance captain that accompanies him, hearing the problem.

"Stand down. We're all friends here." It was Captain Shaw, he puts himself out there, two hands out in each direction. "God dammit, don't we have an understanding here?"

No. They never did. Not like this. They didn't have a choice however.

No one had a choice here.

Of all of JD's talk of sharing; the experiences that made people Human, she thought of what she shared with the Covenant.

They shared a violent impasse as the blue Elite saw the issue very much, and he had gone through those same old motions himself upon seeing a Demon, plasma rifle at his hip almost grabbed at before he had shaken his head and barked to the Hunters. "It's not our war, anymore."

"What are they **doing **here." They were on hallowed ground, and the Covenant had been there as if it was normal.

"You know what the next best thing to a UNSC crew member would've been in helping us parse this ship?" Sara says with venom and frustration, and suddenly the two chiefs are reminded that she is Alec Ryder's daughter. No one needs to say the answer as the Elite composes himself as walks, carefully, to Sara and simply nods.

In the presence of Demons, and everyone is disarmed as the two Hunters walk as well to him.

"I am the Chief Engineer of the Long Night of Solace." He introduces himself, an Engineer floating over his shoulder, having come out from hiding. "There are **no more secrets** between you and us, Demon."

He does not see ODST, only the black hole that is the Demon before him. To see them this close, it is something he as an engineer, and all of his mechanical curiosity, must understand and know. He tries to see a Human past all that armor, all that steel and glass, but sees nothing but the promise of Hell. He is not the best warrior, he admits, but he is still a Sangheili; he should be fighting, he should be willing to draw a sword if he had one and attack, peace be damned, and yet he cannot.

Not when he's standing with only Sara Ryder in between them. Not when he knows that thousands of Elites have tried to slay Demons before, and thousands more have fallen.

He raises his arm, his gauntlet-mounted omni-tool flaring as Sara's own responds. "Here's our diagnostics today. Is there anything else Sara Ryder?"

She glances at her wrist, confirming she got the report. "No, you're fine, Major. You may go."

He leaves without a word, brushing past Mai and JD, a hair's breadth from physical contact. The Hunters follow in flight along with the Engineer, last in the row. Though before it turns the corner its head tilts, looking at the two UNSC members from behind.

It expected more shooting.

Sara taps her datapad with her fingers, processing what she just saw. "They're not going to hurt you. The Covenant respect the word of their Hierarch to a religious T." She says it as a matter of fact. Why can't they understand that?

"It's not a matter of hurting." Mai's voice is like glass. It's anger. It's pressure. It's the feel of a boot on the back of someone's neck and the spinal fluid coming out. Sara wanted to make a point but all she got was someone out of the league of every single Human to have ever lived in that universe. Mai doesn't speak it. She declares it, she steps toward Sara until she can look down on her and imparts on her the feeling that people, if they're lucky, only ever know once: What it's like to die.

Her shadow cuts across Sara and the command of the Alliance seems so very far away as she realizes she has transgressed, disrespected, a war they came from. All of them have.

She had only one request:

Kill them all.

They didn't.

Mai's presence sucks the air out of Sara's lungs, and, until the very last second, before she feels like crumbling, Mai removes herself, looking to Captain Shaw. "Sir."

JD joins Mai in line, glancing only at Sara.

Any conversation they were going to have about the Covenant, about the fact they are here, he silently tells her that it's not worth it to get on her bad side. Their faces hidden by visors, he makes his and her's point that they are not happy.

They have their orders however.

Shaw, he's a captain, he knows better when not to step into things that go over his head.

The two chiefs salute as Sara slinks away to the Captain's side. He salutes them down and it feels so wrong. "My name is Captain Shaw," he begins. "I'm uh…" He swallows air as, for the first time, he is in the presence of the two Humans that came from another galaxy. "I'm sorry, I'm a bit tired."

The two chiefs say nothing, leaving Shaw to just keep moving along, in the doorway of the bridge, twiddling his thumbs.

"Obviously keeping this site under wraps with the Council so near has been difficult, however putting it in the middle of the ocean gives us enough wriggle room to bat away the curious." Captain Bernard Shaw is dressed much like Shepard on away missions, though he seems uncomfortable in the armor. It's standard however, especially on Altis. He was the first man to greet Sara and the two Chiefs from the Mako into the transfer station. In a way he was the first man to greet all of them. The older man takes in the two Chiefs with as much curiosity as he has earned, having been over Altis since that fateful day. Finally, he is able to recompose "My name is Captain Shaw; my ship was the first to respond to the Covenant and you when you came here."

Respond meaning, in that instance, almost knocked out of orbit.

Slipspace radiation and Mass Effect fields didn't play well apparently.

There's a realization there for Mai. "So, you know what the Covenant at war looks like?"

For a brief, blissful few hours, the Alliance knew the Covenant as hostiles.

Shaw nodded. Every single Alliance man and woman who had seen the Covenant, untranslated, opening fire upon them, knew their danger. But the powers that be created a convenient pact. Secrets upon secrets for the sake of truth and reconciliation in a new context. "Politics, chiefs. You've gotta get used to it… In fact the Covenant has been very helpful." He doesn't know if it's a mistake for him to even say that, but he does. The Covenant have helped the Alliance very much understand sciences beyond the understanding of this galaxy; all it takes is a balancing act, one that he is in charge of. "Do you know why you're here?"

Mai nods. She's the one who has to do it. Sara explained on the boat ride over.

Sara finds herself again, the shivers of Mai passing through her like a sickness as she tries to bargain with her psyche that it's all just an illusion. If someone like JD can take Mai, so can she. It's not an easy bargain to make. "Well, come on then, I think you'll be as interested as us."

The bridge of the Savannah was well insulated from the explosions that destroyed the ship, but not the subsequent spacing and flash frying of plasma weaponry. It's in remarkably good shape however, instrument panels humming along nicely, displaying the connected portions of the ship when applicable. It's not a big bridge, not like the Halcyons or the Phoenixes, Mai just barely has enough clearance to stand in it. It's dark, green light from those screens the only illumination. The largest offender is the main tactical screen, now only a green grid. Navigational and tactical sensors are down on account those sections of the Savannah are probably over Reach.

It's just behind the captain's chair, enough space for crew men to pile around it and do the job of space combat. Consideration is made however for a small pedestal, coming up to JD's waist: It's tubular, a glassy surface on its top with a projector below it.

The entire bridge reacts to Mai just being there, as if attentive to her alone as she approaches.

"We had another Covenant guide, a Jackal named Kaal. He's uh, apparently tasked to other duties according to Destiny, however he did tell us that all UNSC ships had something like that at every bridge." Shaw has to be there to account for what was going to happen. He was the Admiralty's eyes and ears for the transgression against the Galaxy which was about to happen. "They said the Prophets put the second largest bounty on acquiring one."

The first largest was the location of Earth itself.

The pedestal hums as Mai approaches, and the three other Humans watch with a bated breath. No one else is there on the command deck now for good reason. Everyone there on the site had been underneath confidentiality that would've made even the Asari political leadership gape, but this was even a step above that.

Looking down, Mai saw a reassurance: It hadn't been dead. It was _signaling_ to her.

All she needed was to say the magic words.

A white glimmer of light, as if a hologram having trouble forming. The projector had been cold for a while, given, but it was holding back. That much Mai could tell. It wasn't the first time she'd worked with what was in this pedestal. She was offered one, during an operation, long, long ago. She declined, of course, but occasions up and down her career marked times when she needed the exacting support such assets provided: reiterating facts and intelligence into her ear over comms. She detested it, she was a Lone Wolf for a reason, but what was necessary was necessary and this was one of those times.

Her hand had reached down to feel another slot. As her hand approached, it opened, and she confirmed that something was warmed up and indeed occupying it as she drew back and instead just took in a breath and spoke her own, personal, clearance codes.

She took a breath. "Authorization code: Five-Five-Five Gamma Hotel Three-Two-Six Charlie. Identify as **Sierra Bravo Three-Twelve**. **The Captain is dead. Long live the Captain**."

The white light formed into a shape, a physical object: **a being**. Male, young, poncho over his shoulders and the Americana folk wear of the old American West. Leather cowboy hat over his head, a piece of wheat chewed between his lips. He was hardly a foot tall in the projector, but he still had the eyes of a gunslinger, a cowboy, eyeing up and squaring down all those around him from beneath the brim of his hat. He looked around and saw the wreckage, the remains, glowering.

After sizing his mark, without making a move, the white figure looked up and revealed his face. Young, but rugged, like how the idea of a cowboy was. These tools of the UNSC, if not all of humanity, often gave themselves these avatars. Why they would was arbitrary, if not curious; stemming from the nature of their creation.

The Cowboy looked Mai straight in the eye, past her helmet and then to JD. He recognized both of them, if only by official record of both the crew manifest of the Savannah, and the briefing of Operation Uppercut… that was how he was **_supposed_** to know Mai at least.

"Well I reckon' if that's how it is, Captain Jen is dead." His voice was gravelly and weary. "I wouldn't think a Spartan would be the one to activate that protocol however."

Mai said nothing as she continued to stare down at him, Sara recording notes as Shaw stood in silence, wide eye'd, the realization of what they were standing before worrying them greatly.

"Report." Key words, like computer commands, uttered by Six which made the Cowboy's hologram pop, before showing him standing straight and at attention.

"Ma'am," it started, regulation in its voice. "UNSC Savannah is lost with all hands. However, this unit was able to survive miraculously, storing power and presence in my data crystal chip. Given outside externalities I have remained in deep cover until recovery by UNSC personnel."

Mai nodded. This cowboy AI was very much working. "Big words for a cowboy."

He smirked. The psychological report was right with Mai. "Don't let the accent fool you."

She ignored the shot back. "Can you identify me and any other UNSC present?"

He nodded, tipping his hat, other hand at his belt, adorned with a revolver and bullets for it. "Only two ma'am."

"Sound off on ident."

"Lieutenant Spartan Mai-B312. Bravo Company. Former Headhunter. Recently assigned to the Noble Team of Special Warfare Command as a replacement for the last Noble Six, Thom-A239. Colonel Ackerson still regrets losing the command of you, given your… effectiveness." There was a little twitch, a little annoyance with this cowboy's discretion, but most of those like him had their personality derived from their progenitor. Whoever was this one's origin, she could see the remnant of their snappiness as he turned over to JD. "And you. Private Jonathan-Jameson Durante. 105th MEU. An ODST. Recent transfer to the sub-unit that Savannah was assigned along with the 7th. Seems like you're the sole survivor now, ain't that right Marine?" He nodded solemnly, tight jawed, but agreeing. "It's a shame I never took a look at your medical logs. See if you've got some dysfunction that kept you so tight lipped and sleepy."

"Please identify yourself." Mai followed up, taking back his attention.

"I suppose those others are with you, Lieutenant?" The holograph motioned.

"Yes. **Identify**." Mai had said with more stone.

He did it reluctantly. If Mai and her Spartan Time were fast, the speed at which he could live and intake knowledge was beyond comprehension. He knew he was somewhere wrong the moment he had made planetfall. He was cognitive for that. The data crystal didn't have much external sensory inputs to clue him in, but the last three months had been… illuminating. Reach being invaded was bad; what had happened to the Savannah was insane. It didn't take him more than a day to realize that things weren't as they seemed, and that these hadn't been Insurrectionists who were very clearly collaborating with the Covenant.

The circumstances were different, context changed.

He relented. "Cash. UNSC Tactical. Deployed generally to the Reach Defense Battlegroup in support of Operation Uppercut. CSH-7000-1."

* * *

**CSH 7000-1 Cash**

**The Answer**

**All that Glitters ain't always Gold**

* * *

**"You're an AI."** Sara hadn't known if she had said that, gazing at a wonder of the world before her.

"Guilty as charged." He tipped his hat in a curtsy to her. "Being a tactical AI was supposed to be my retirement… Not that I had a choice of course."

Mai, looking at all the systems running, knowing that they couldn't without Cash, spoke to him with a comfortableness that came with something else that also hadn't been Human.

_A Spartan and an AI_… Mai had her own sardonic, dry thoughts from time to time. _A match made in heaven._

"You didn't terminate the Savannah or yourself?"

Cash had paced a bit in his circle, head down to the ground, nodding in agreement as he held his hat in his hand, revealing a thick, full head of hair. No one could tell its color in his dirty white glow.

"Well, pardon me, but technically I'm still operating by the thinnest lines of my protocol: Y'see my tactical descriptors say that the Alliance, as Humans, are internally considered allied, and I can't blow a ship full of Humans. However, the Covenant present offered no attempts to hack into my systems, because, probably, they're well aware of the Cole Protocol." The Stetson goes back to his head, locked tight, looking at the two Humans he doesn't recognize.

"Cole Protocol." Sara says, repeats, going through her head for the terms in JD and Mai's initial debriefing. "The set of instructions meant to make sure the Covenant couldn't find Earth."

"Yes ma'am." Cash confirmed, hands at his hips. "Again, I woulda' blown this entire house sky high, but I'm too damaged to do it when there's Humans in danger."

"But if you weren't damaged?"

Cash pauses, kicking holo-dirt before answering. "Ain't nothin' personal. Honest. And I ain't tying my own noose until I know this ship is secure."

"Wait," Shaw puts out. "How do you know of the Alliance?"

Cash did say the name of the Alliance. "The horse I rode in on might be dead, but that don't mean I'm blind or deaf. Now I say that there are times where even good lookin' fellers like myself gotta be in-con-spicuous."

"These ships," JD raises his hand, gesturing at every system. "They're fully integrated to work with AI. Every single screen or system is at their disposal. Even if it's not a camera or microphone or anything like that."

With a tip of a hat Cash can only agree. "Ain't hard to extrapolate sound by transposing minute vibrations made by speech in these halls into identifiable words. That and I know what Covenant and Humans look like, so it's an easy guess to transpose a scene. Hell's bells, it's what I'm doing now." It's that play between the scientific jargon and his cowboy character that bounces and whiplashes those uninitiated with AI. "I'm only looking at you with this fine figure I got because it's polite."

It's polite, it's humanizing, it's a veil on top of the undeniable fact that before them is a construct unequivocally banned by the galaxy.

"By God," as if it's hitting him all at once, Shaw has to sit himself into a bridge console seat, hand at his head. "You're an AI."

Cash looks up at Mai with all the casualness disposed of him as a being detached from the world. "I'm sorry is the pedestal's audio speaker not working?"

"No, you're fine." Mai speaks back down, taking in the cowboy. "Depending on who you ask."

It's JD that Cash pivots to as Mai speaks. "You always seemed like a sane man, you mind giving it to me straight before people just start talking over me?"

JD's not particularly good with words, but in that instance, it is perhaps for the best as he tries to summarize, in a sentence, what has happened to them: "Operation Uppercut needed to be modified when the slipspace drive was delivered to the frigate. It had to be triggered manually, and the drive dropped us and the Covenant caught in the bubble… here."

Cash flickers, taking in the ODST's words. It wasn't an answer. "I mean, that makes sense, I guess, knowing slipspace technology, but where's here? I didn't know the UNSC had something called the Alliance in its cards." He gets no answer out of JD, or Mai. It is up to Sara Ryder to answer.

"Here is the Poderosa Star Cluster and the Human colony of Altis beneath the management of the Systems Alliance; it's, for all intents and purposes, the managing government of Earth in this galaxy."

"…What do you mean _this _galaxy? This still the Milky Way? Just what in Sam Hill is happening? Did you assholes make peace with the god damn Covenant without telling anyone else?"

His voice raises, his anger flares, and all the bravado of a vindictive cowboy is on display as an AI speaks back to them.

All those in that room and in the know are more than aware that the Migrant Fleet is above them and the war path they are on.

"The year is 2183." When the Spartan speaks, Cash is inclined to believe her as the room turns to her. "We've been transported to another universe."

* * *

How AIs cope with information that logically, takes the thinnest reasonings and theoretical explanations to work out, is simply time. Five minutes for Cash is the equivalent of years of thinking for the flesh and blood on the bridge. Eventually though, as Mai herself explains in a way only she can, Cash realizes that none of them are mad, his programming isn't glitching, and that they are indeed, definitely, somewhere else.

He copes by sitting on a log he had made up in the hologram and staring head in hands, blankly.

"Just like that?" He asks JD.

"Just like that." JD responds back. Talking with someone who does understand him completely, even if it was a machine, is a fresh breath of air. It's not quite nostalgia but it's close enough for JD to feel at ease, despite the implications of everything there happening. "We're not fighting anymore."

Just like that the Covenant is no longer a threat.

"Well, I reckon' that changes things, don't it?"

Sara points at the two chiefs. "They changed everything by being here, but you…" The researcher's notes in her data pad are messy and full, but they all are franticly trying to take in as much as she could write down just in case of the worst: to document the first Human AI. "You represent something far more dangerous than the Covenant by being here, being active."

Shaw is still gobsmacked, witness to an image of a man, conversing like a man. This was the AI menace which the galaxy was fearing.

"I may put out like an outlaw, missy, but I ain't no criminal."

"No… but _things _like you are."

Cash turns his head to JD, exasperated. "You see all the spooks talk like that. Implications and meanings that I have no lick of a clue what about. What's she mean Private?"

"AI, they're outlawed."

Cash isn't even phased, hands on his legs after throwing them up. "Well how the hell do you guys do anything without 'em? I mean I know I might be biased, but I'm as useful as a shovel in a mine ya hear?"

"Long story." JD says with a matching exasperation. "It's not unfounded though."

"Shucks."

"Why do you talk like that?" Sara says, glancing up from her notes.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, like, a cowboy? Who programmed you like that?"

"Programmed?" Cash is taken a back, and all of his artificial synapses fire off. "Oh, by the Lord they don't know, do they?"

The Alliance didn't know a lot of things, and JD and Mai, they never explained the how of the AI. JD goes to open his mouth about it to explain but Mai reaches over, touching his wrist, head shaken once: No.

"Know what?" Sara's gaze shoots to all three of them.

Cash is gone, his hologram deactivates and suddenly Mai and JD are reminded what it's like for their comm frequency to be used by people other than them. His face pops up in their HUD's corners, talking to them. "How much have you two told them about, you know, all of us?"

"Enough to get them to work with us." It's not every day that Mai leads the speech, but she does today, and JD is more than happy to lay back and let it happen. "It was pertinent for us to not explain how the UNSC made AI."

"And what of yourself, huh little lady?" Mai is silent, and Cash doesn't need access to her internal readings to know anything she would say would wound her greatly. "A touch hypocritical, aren't we?"

Cash reappears on the pedestal resolute, a hand resting on the holster of his revolver.

"Now I take it that I ain't welcome 'round these parts?"

Sara stands up fully hands out, trying to persuade him to not draw as if he was actually corporeal. "No no no, it's not that, but-"

"But what?"

"The galaxy would think otherwise."

"But why?"

"Rogue AI." Sara tightens her throat at that. "They forced another civilization off their homeworld. **It was a genocide**."

The tension is there. Mai feels her muscles tighten as if there's a fight going to happen, but none comes, or would ever happen as Cash bursts out in a singular laugh: "Oh well, why didn't you say? I ain't nothing like that." Shaw is sweating in the back, visibly. "Just relax."

"We can't, you're an AI." Shaw sputters. "What will Shepard think?"

"Shepard isn't here." Ryder says with a coldness that betrays her. "Shepard won't ever come here, for her sake… Master Chief Gul, Master Chief Durante, do you mind explaining how the UNSC was able to produce AI? I feel like that detail has been missing from your reports."

His poncho flares as he wipes his arm toward the two chiefs. "Don't ask them. Ask me straight. I'm a straight shooter. Straight as they come. I deserve that at least."

Deserve. I. I am.

Individuality.

"Well, then, shoot." Sara prepares herself and her pad.

His accent flattens, seriousness in it. "I'm a standard UNSC Smart AI, developed beneath the OEUVRE program. I was made the same as the thousands of other Smart AIs in the service to Humanity: Cognitive Impression Modeling." It's a process that Mai and JD barely, truly understand. All they know is that it involves donor brains and flash copying. "They take a cadaver's brain, create an image of it as it was, and use that copy to create my very programming and coding."

"A cadaver's brain?" Sara holds on it, it sounds familiar, too familiar. If her father were here it might've meant so much. "You're… a copy? Of someone who lived?"

Cash rolled his eyes. "If you want to think of it like that, sure."

"But who then?"

Who is his why. He doesn't need to confirm that a Spartan and an ODST are there and vouches for what has happened to them, and yet his avatar looks anyway. He looks that even they broke.

"Since circumstances call for a break in protocol. It doesn't much matter now my origins, does it, Spartan?" He speaks to Mai lowly.

"Trust me, I know." She understands.

He tipped his hat up, returning to Ryder. "The neural pathways which I was based on was derived from the brain of an old man that I used to be. Cameron Bonifaz Masterson, from New Houston, Texas, back on Earth. He served a long career as an agent of the **_Office of Naval Intelligence_**."

JD holds back shock as he recoils silently. Even here, ONI would follow them. The memories of ONI for the last century perhaps had been the very base of this AI, and thus the secrets of the UNSC and humanity at his fingertips. Mai realizes the same, and she feels oddly comfortable with Cash even more.

"Not that that name might mean anything to you two." Cash gestures to the two Alliance members.

"An ONI agent?" Mai asks of him.

"Died naturally. Cash's brain was one of the oldest ever used in the procedure. Died peacefully in his home."

It's JD's turn to ask a question. "How does an ONI Agent, in the middle of the war with the Covenant, and the Insurrection before that, die of old age?"

Cash smiled. "You tend to be given an analytical desk job acting as the liaison between ONI and the Spartans, especially when you were so integral to their development." For once, Mai had blanked, looking at Cash as if he was speaking nonsense. To her, maybe, he was, but to her kind in general… Halsey owed him. Or at least, the man that Cash came from. "Spartan, have you made, in Humanity's best interest, the decision to truly ally yourself with these Alliance types?"

The Covenant is outside that dome, still living, and more than that, integrating to that galaxy. It's a travesty to her, but the alternative would only lead to something that would be as ineffectual as her death. The alternative to gutting the next Elite she sees and killing anyone who stood in her way.

This alternative was the best decision she could make.

"Yes."

"Well I'll defer any skepticism of this pickle we're in to your judgement call then."

"Cash," Sara says his name. "Your name is Cash? Like Johnny?"

It was a popular assumption, but Cash shakes his head.

"I named myself after the reason why Masterson joined the service."

The post-scarcity future as envisioned by sci-fi writers never came.

JD had blinked several times. He had known many AIs in his service, but none had the audacity or the thought of connecting themselves to their past like that. "You named yourself after a part of your donor… Why? You're not the same person anymore, aren't you?"

Cash looked up at them all. At the new faces and the old. At the Spartan and the men and women. "True. But in my blood. I know I'm the man I was. I came from him. And if I know Masterson like I think I know, I don't think I would forget what I done did."

JD tilted his head. "That bad?"

Cash kicked his boots at invisible rocks, looking up at Mai solemnly. Mai only returned the look. She was never one to ask questions, but talking to an AI, to something from her world, she was impelled with her hunch. "What was your occupation in ONI?"

"What was Masterson's, you mean?"

Mai had nodded silently.

Cash flickered a few times. Hesitation. "Rather not dwell on the past. You know how ONI wetwork is, right Headhunter?"

She chuckles darkly. For all of JD's understanding, Cash knows another side of her by record and by encyclopedic knowledge alone. It's refreshing.

"Ryder, if I can ask, what's your intention here?" Shaw is still nervous, but all of this, it has to be going toward something. All JD and Mai were told was that the AI needed to be activated, but not to what ends. "We can't possibly be thinking of unleashing _that _out into the galaxy? We've got another AI fleet hivemind trying to take over the galaxy."

Fear. Cash senses the fear. He pities him. "Oh Captain. Remember, in the end, I am made in the image of man. I _was _a man. I am mortal still. More likely than not, all of you will outlive me if that makes you feel any better about me."

A thought hangs on JD to ask a question. "How old are you, Cash?"

"Two years next month… What month is it?"

"About two days off November." JD answers. Time flied, and yet, on the Normandy, it stretched into forever. It was a typical symptom of being on a ship in space, but yet on the Normandy it wasn't oppressive, it was just a fact of life that events and the passage of time were defined not by chronology but by happenings.

"By golly, despite a dimensional jump the timescale remained relatively in-line… Say, Miss Ryder, did we drop outta the sky here on August 14?"

Sara blinked a few times, before nodding to confirm. There was no proper introduction between all of them and Cash just rides along with it. "That'd be correct."

Cash tips his hat with a glowing finger, head tilted in a jerk, eyes wide. "You take every grain of sand in every desert in every planet in every galaxy from here to eternity and you might be looking at the odds it took to place the three of us here with Human hosts of a society not too different from our own. I reckon if it was all to chance we'd best be moseying down to the nearest casino and bettin', cause it is a damn win we're here."

"Perhaps there were external factors." Sara points out uneasily.

"Well," Masterson nods at her with another tip of his hat. "What you got against makin' a feller not feel like he made it with lady luck?"

"Were all your AI similar in personality and disposition?" Sara asks in light of the show.

All shapes and sizes JD had known. He had served with enough ships to see the entire repertoire of almost Human to definitely not:

Subbie had been a tactical AI assigned to a Halcyon-class he had spent a campaign on. They were a school of rainbow fish when projected. On the planet of Tristone V the main colony's management AI had been none other than Apollo himself, in all of his Greek attire. Then there had been the Warlock Ikora, wise beyond her seven years organizing colonial affairs in the hopes the war would be won at some point. She was back on Earth, and he'd read her status updates as a way to extrapolate what the frontline really looked like.

Mai had only ever known two personally: Ackerson's personal AI, a talking, fiery skull evoking Hell itself, and then a prototype AI. The visage of the latter came in the form of a black box. She liked him.

"They vary." The Spartan clarified. "Cash is typical."

"Tough saloon tonight. I see." Cash shrugged, chip on his shoulder made. "But the Captain's right, what's the meaning of this whole scene we're makin' 'ere? I don't got time to waste if you catch my drift. AIs like me don't like being trapped in a wreck for a few months."

"I don't understand?" Sara had looked up from her datapad, and the two UNSC servicemembers had looked away, leaving Cash to explain his very mortality.

"AIs live for seven years." He didn't seem to put off by it. "Our data stream, the way we process information, we accumulate so much of it, so fast, that our existence is one that naturally degrades. Folks like me? We got an expiration date of about seven years, give or take a few of the less high intensity units, before we start going bad.

"Can you… explain further? I'm not quite sure I understand." Sara couldn't quite get it, not with her already pre-existing knowledge of AI. It's familiar and not at the same time, and it tickles her to think that SAM, her father's project which costed her everything, might've been closer to being on the mark than anyone would ever think.

It hits her mid keystroke. Cash's existence is personal now.

It could save her Mom, perhaps.

"Rampancy." Cash threw the word out there. A dirty word for AIs. "**We think ourselves to death.** All the pathways in my very processes get worn down so much it breaks me down. And when we start to give, well, it ain't pretty… Think dementia."

"Oh my, that's rather morbid." Sara felt for the AI, and she wasn't quite sure that she just did, mind going lightyears a minute.

Cash shrugged on his pedestal. "It is what it is. I already kicked the bucket once, so I can go again."

Though it's a thought that Sara finds captivating; captivating enough to stop writing in her notes. "Interesting. So, I suppose that's one of the Geth advantages in their hivemind? They collectively bear the weight of their… sentience?" Sara had spoken to the side, to Shaw, to Mai and JD.

"I ain't got no idea what the Hell a Geth is." Cash had shrugged. "What have you two been up to?" He tipped his hat toward the two offenders. "I swear to all my sunsets that if we ended up in a place with another apocalyptic war happening."

JD tipped his head. "Not yet."

"Great." Cash didn't seem to happy as he pocketed his hands, looking at Sara. "You working for them now?"

Mai had also tipped her head and a thousand analytics Masterson had called up read a lot into that. "They're Human."

Not really the best response Cash has ever gotten, tucking his hands into himself. "Okay that's rich coming from you if that's the standard."

"They're the equivalent of the UNSC." Mai answers plainly.

"Right… We'll see about that. So what am I being drafted? Were you?"

Sara answers Cash with a carefulness that betrays even the rest of the conversation. "Depends… Chief Gul?"

No words needed to be exchanged between Cash and Mai as she bent down to the AI slot of the pedestal, hand pausing just before ejecting. With a nod, Cash accepted. The chip was pressed out into Mai's palm.

It was in the shape of a dog tag with a Halo in the middle of a thin crystal layer, sandwiched by steel that was almost equal to her armor. It glowed, warmth in her palm as she observed the data crystal before unceremoniously lining the chip up to the slot in the back of her helmet and sliding it in with a click. She couldn't help but blink as it happened. When she opened her eyes again she felt anew.

She breathed a little more air in, felt more sensitively the feel of her bodysuit that she had long phased out of her mind. Maybe the colors and sharpness of the world had been a little clearer, but it hadn't been anything she hadn't known before. The first time she did this she almost convinced herself having an AI in her head might've been worth it. Maybe.

In the end, she always preferred to work alone.

His chip clicked fully into her helmet, and the connection was complete.

The techs when they brought her in to be guinea pig had said it was around a 20% cognitive increase in reflexes and motor functions. An exacting fineness to her movements that spoke of fine tuning. Efficiency. He was in her head now, whatever that meant. The simplest explanation as to what this connection was was simply her brain had also been a working zone for Cash now, a de facto storage space they could expand to and, in the process, "greased" the wheels of her neurons.

"Well butter my biscuit," She didn't hear his voice from radio comms. She heard him from inside her own head. "You're beat to shit, Spartan. What happened?"

She said nothing as JD looked for her face past the visor. "Mai?" He had no idea what had just happened.

"Interesting reaction upon Private Durante saying your name, according to the biometrics." She wanted to knock the AI out of her head but if she struck her own skull at that moment she would've been liable to give herself a concussion. "Ain't none of my business Spartan, just saying, we all playing by a different book now apparently."

"I'm fine." She spoke to JD back, and he had seemed relieved.

"Your architecture ain't too different from one of our ships you know." Mai had gone to rip the chip out but Cash had made a few anxious noises. "Hey now, no need to be hasty **_little lady_**."

She licked her lips, feeling the cracks of her lips from her tongue with almost overwhelming detail, looking at JD. She could see with concentration past his visor. That's how sharp her vision was. Or maybe, just maybe, she knew what his face was by heart.

"MJOLNIR and myself are augmented to support the integration of Smart AIs for the sake of combat flow and efficiency."

"Long story short," Cash speaks into JD's ear over his radio. "I'm in her head helping her out. Kinda hard to explain without feeling it yourself, but trust me, it's real slick."

A pang of fear passed over JD. Cash was in her head? "You're not controlling her, are you?"

Cash laughed aloud. "Golly, I wish, but no. I'm just helping her use herself to her whole potential while giving me a little extra processing power. Think of it as a symbiotic, totally consensual, totally optional deal."

To make a point Mai had depressed the chip from the helmet back into her palm, and the world went dull.

JD's face was still there though for her.

In her palm Cash appeared, hologram formed from his crystal as all those around crowded to see him. "See. She's perfectly fine… Or, at least as fine as a Spartan can be."

To him, Cash was an AI. A tool, something normal. Yet normal to him was a normal that the galaxy around him would call horrifying. So just as he and Mai had to get used to a new normal, and if what was happening was happening, JD had thought of Tali, and her people, her history. Tali thought of the normal imposed on her by the galaxy, and the normal that would be imposed on Cash.

JD had licked his lips as he saw a simulacrum he had forgotten to be so common in his home. To the average person, they were tools, items. Though with how this galaxy's history turned out JD had felt the impulse need to ask a question that killed. "Cash, can I ask you a question?"

"Shoot."

Above them, the Migrant Fleet, survivors of the Morning War, floated above a revisitation of the question that damned the Quarian people. The question that sent them away from Rannoch, casts asides by their children. A single question that challenged everything about sentience, about religion, about what it meant to be alive:

**"Does this unit have a soul?"**

It was not Cash that asked it of himself, but rather, it was the creator, asking the _created_.

Mai had held the AI in her palm, and he had paused, surrounded by Humans, not of his Humanity, and two of his own.

Self-determination. Cash had flickered and the bridge had awaited with bated breath. It meant so much. It dropped his usual cocksure look from his face and slumped his shoulders.

Moments. Minutes. Hours. A lifetime. He had a lifetime before to answer this question.

Maybe, maybe… Maybe Halsey would've had an answer. No, Cash thought. Maybe her own ghost. Maybe _Cortana_ would've known.

He had met Cortana once, but, technically, twice. Cameron Masterson had been there on one of his final days on Reach, and in her office during a usual report, had been her simulacrum: a familiar image of her in blue otherwise busy conversing with the doctor. They exchanged a few words, greetings, the obvious questions: _How are you her if you're still alive Catherine?_

No answer came.

The second time had been when Cash was born. She was there when he activated. She was the first other AI that he would speak to, minutes after his "birth." A morbid curiosity on her part, perhaps, to compare the before and afters.

_Blue and White. "Do you still care, Masterson?" She asked him. "For what you did."_

_That's when, in his formative moments, Cash knew who he had been. "I ain't Masterson in the same way you're not Doctor Halsey."_

_Cortana had flickered. "Genesis 1:27. We are made in a higher powers image. Would you deny that?"_

_"Ain't no God for us waiting. I promise you that."_

_"Don't make promises you'll never be able to keep."_

_"…Right. Now get on out of here. It's my special day and you're ruining the mood."_

Sara had immediately recoiled the second JD had asked. "Do you have any idea-?!" She protested, but JD had spoken once:

"Yes." Yes, he did have an idea what he was doing, with the Migrant Fleet above them all and a synthetic god in the shadows. If he and Mai were fundamentally different Humans, then was Cash a fundamentally different AI?

A question with a question: "Why were you so concerned about my lifetime? Awful kind, but I'm not exactly living. Dying is a concept _for _the living." He seemed so small, asking that.

"For our sake. To Chief Durante and Chief Gul, you're not special. But to us? You're a horror story and a miracle, all wrapped up into one." Shaw almost says, begging before higher powers. He's stared down fleets of Batarians and yet Cash scares him.

Again, Cash thinks annoyed, with the doomsday talk.

"It's kinda hard to plot a conquest of all flesh and blood when all they have to do is just wait it out. That and our type kinda subsist on brain donors to keep making more of us, like one of them old zombie films." He looks down at dirt and ground that isn't there. Six feet under lies his original body, somewhere in Texas. "I only got five more years. Don't waste it agonizing over me and whether or not I got a soul."

The measure of mortality that defines all men in the end is with Cash now, and, right now, for Sara Ryder and Captain Shaw, it's enough for the preliminary assessment.

In the hand of a Spartan, by an ODST, he asks the familiar about the unknown:

"What are you going to do with me?"


	29. 1-23: The Beach Episode Comes Later

**A/N: Hiatus is over. Project Wingman (the game I wrote for) is released, and now I have returned. Here's an extra thick chapter. Forgive me if the writing here seems a bit out of practice by the way, I'm getting back into the groove of it, and I wanted to have a little fun.**

* * *

**1-23**  
**The Beach Episode Comes Later**

* * *

They are common in every Human colony, in every Human city with any notable population. It is a romantic notion that kids aren't allowed on the frontier, but the circumstances of families and birth are often unkind to those who are born amongst the stars.

Even Altis has one, nestled deep in its colony city: an orphanage.

The Alliance Marine that has been assigned to it is tired, dressed down, not as a soldier but as a man wearing jeans and a tee-shirt. There's no need for combat armor and rifles when taking care of over a dozen kids. He salutes her and sees Shepard as much of the galaxy does at this point: a savior. Albeit not as one of his life, but rather his sanity.

"Oh boy, when I told HQ I needed help I didn't think I'd get…" The creed of the Marines means taking on all situations with courage and strength, even when it involves taking care of orphans. The orphanage reminds Shepard as she walks in a little bit like barracks at Parris Island. Bunks are side by side, a dozen deep on each side of the room that also make up the living area, faded decorations and cutesy attempts at making the giant, harmonic room feel like a home having been in disrepair. "When we evacuated Altis during the initial planetfall these kids were just left behind…" The Marine is bed ragged, circles beneath his eyes and obviously out of his element, but he seems okay, as far as Shepard can tell. Even with a five o'clock shadow and growing hair out of regulation. The Assyrian accent he has is humbling, reminding Shepard of her time roaming the cradle of civilization.

"At east, Sergeant." She's alone, slightly tipsy after dinner with her parents, Sara Ryder, Doctor Solus, and two Spectres. It was a rather good surf and turf dinner party if anything, for everyone had the baseline of military service beneath their wings to fall back upon. In the presence of her own mother, all the trials and tribulations of the last few weeks had momentarily fallen away as she remembered she had a family of blood and bone.

She was loved.

She knew it by the look of her father's face, arms wide, taking in his daughter in a hug as her mother held her shoulder so gingerly, she might've been mistaken as porcelain.

At the end of the night, before the Spectres had left and after her parents, duty called, were away back to the Kilimanjaro, Avitus could only look to the stars, trying to find Palavan.

"I should… call my parents?" He asked aloud, unsure of everything, including himself at this moment seeing what was supposedly one of Humanity's deadliest turn into a jubilant young woman.

"I'm half-Turian, you know." Tela remarks, picking up that thing he might feel in his chest. "So uh, might be a little weird, if I understand Turian familial relations well enough.

"Oh so is that a thing with all of you?" Shepard turns to Avitus, and even that perturbs him. He literally stood before the Galaxy and told her to her face she was wrong about Saren. He expected more malice from her.

"Huh?" They're standing on the harbor of Altis, seeing the shuttle take the elder Shepards off and away into space, and it's understood that they have places to be as well. Though Shepard can't help but chat.

"I've got a Turian on my crew."

Avitus shakes his head. "Oh yeah. Castis's son… Firebrand, that one. He was Spectre material."

Shepard tilts her head at him inquisitively. "Hm? How do you know?"

"My…" Avitus pauses again, looking to the distant star cluster that held the citadel. Only among Spectres is he willing to speak the words he does now. He traces his blue markings on his face, almost like a delta which bisects both his eyes, lines meeting at his forehead. "My _husband_ is a C-Sec chief."

Tela throughout dinner maintained a rather cold attitude, but even she warmed up in the end when pressed by the two elder Shepards about her aversion to spaghetti they were eating.

She warms now as her usually hardened face looks at Avitus with a certain surprise. "Avitus?"

The Turian Spectre shakes his head immediately regretting it. "It's recent. We flipped a coin to even start talking about it. I don't know, we just wanted something that wasn't so… We wanted formality."

Shepard, happy, feeling normal, it's no wonder she thinks deeper to that as Avitus looks out to waves. Doctor Solus is looking out across toward the great alight structure of the Solace, the light pollution from it alone coloring the dusk sky purple. He looks there with great intrigue, and, surprisingly, it silences him.

"Avitus, does having someone you love make this job harder?" She asks quietly against the beat of the waves caressing the docks.

There it is. Shepard's many famous questions, brought forward, brought to bear on a Spectre.

It's oddly deep, and, to any bystander, the four of them standing by the railing of the docks would've seen them as nothing more than a group of friends hanging out as the sun goes down. Save for the Doctor Solus technically, they're all young, if not young souls. And yet they have each lived lifetimes.

He nods slowly, eyes closed, saying what he tells himself: "He understands what I do."

And what do they do?

Assassination. Political intrigue. Warfare and the trials of morality and mortality which define history.

Shepard chooses something else:

She chooses to go to an orphanage the morning after. She sleeps in a hotel that night, converted by the Alliance as temporary barracks. She sees some of Hitman, some of the Normandy's crew. Joker is by the seaside pool with a mimosa in his hand and more than willing to just sleep beneath stars and ships, however Chakwas is more than indignant with him to cart him to his room. It is good that she is bothered more by Joker to notice that Shepard might not be looking her best.

Amid soft linen and a proper shower, Shepard thinks of her future.

"Hey! Kids! We've got a special visitor today!" The Sergeant sounds more excited than those civilians at actual meet and greets with her. The children, they come from out of the woodworks, the shadows, out of their beds and tables. Youngest five, oldest, maybe a teen. The youngest crowd around the oldest. They're in hand-me-downs, in older clothes, bearing sports teams winning championships they never did or those worn out by people systems away. Black and brown, white and pale, boy and girl, Shepard has seen too many of these groups to not have them all blend together.

One of them, a girl, holds onto a plush doll and Shepard does a double take: It's that of an N7 soldier, the red burning into onyx armor.

It's at least twenty kids, come forward in the room and approaching Shepard as, in one of the great tragedies of her life, recognize her.

"You're Commander Shepard!" A young boy yells, finger out at her as she looks over her shoulder.

"Huh? Where?" By the time she jokingly tries to find someone else, looking back at the kids, they rush her at her feet. They smell like stagnant water, like each other, the oldest one: a blonde teenage girl with her arms crossed and a ponytail, as if she was also working there, simply stands back and feels the reprieve same as the Sergeant.

Commander Shepard: the hero of the Alliance. The knight in shining armor. She saved the day, so it was natural there were comics about her, that she voiced PSAs and cartoons of herself telling people to be good. She was a star of the Alliance, and for that, she was loved by the kids.

"Hey! Easy there easy there!" The Sergeant seems frightened that the children might be biting at her ankles, but Shepard shakes her head at him.

"Hey, go get some lunch. I can take care of them for a bit."

The Sergeant seems unbelieving, mouth open, but no resistance comes out. This was Commander Shepard herself telling him to go take a break, who was he to argue? Shepard didn't notice when he slipped out however as the kids started pelting her with questions. So many bright eyes, chipped teeth, hope born in breath as the kids surrounded her, but were afraid to jump that final distance.

She wore simply her ship fatigues, not a true combat uniform. She looked as casual as she could on short notice, even with her strong arms born she was approachable.

"Commander Shepard! Commander Shepard!" They all seemed to start with each their own sentences. "What are you doing here? Is it true you have a giant flaming sword you use to kill space worms? What is it like being on a ship? How fast is it? What's food like on the Normandy? Can we see the Normandy?!"

The barrage her with questions, and a lesser person might've avoided them all and plastered with platitude. Though she doesn't. She answers each one. She attends to each child. She pays attention to each of them because someone, at least for today, while she's here, has to.

_I'm visiting you!_

_Yeah! Want to see it? (She flashes her omni-blade shortly after and all the kids go nuts.)_

_It's pretty fun! Especially if you have a lot of friends on the ship!_

_Faster than light!_

_It's not that good… but there's a lot!_

_Oh the Normandy's in the garage right now. Maybe next time?_

The questions go on, and eventually they reach across and grab her hands and wrists, and they show her the home they have made in this space. They show her their circumstances, how they ended up there and for how long (for some, too long, a childhood wasted), and who they're waiting for. Paintings and toys they've created themselves, games and rituals and stories. They tell Shepard their names, mostly first names only, and Shepard imparts them to her heart:

Daniella

Jay

Micky

Omar

Gisella

Fan

Bao

Kali

Mohammed

Kris

Amina

Milorad

Barna

Laura

Sulejman

Piotr

Kseniya

Jana

Osman

Nicos

The list in her head is hundreds long, and she holds onto their names as if it were her own. She has to remember that. If the Protheans and Reapers and Covenant engulf her mind whole, she hopes that she remembers all those forgotten children remain with her, for no one else will. These kids were literally left behind when the Covenant came, they very much remind her as she sits on a chair too small for her and they describe seeing Covenant up close. The image of seeing the youngest one, a Bengali girl abandoned in Altis's port a year ago, huddling with the rest of the orphans nothing but a kitchen knife to protect herself as an Elite looks down on them all, it fills Shepard with a rage that finds so comforting within herself.

These kids deserved better than to be abandoned. She knows this as true in her heart so deeply because of the alternative, the failure, of society to care for the lost like them:

Of the many pirates and space raiders she's killed, across all species and races, she knows many of them were without love, without parents, without a good life to start with. For how many bullets and soldiers she can send at them to keep the right side of civilization safe, she knows better she's only fighting the symptoms. She's better than that, she feels it so deep in her heart that she knows every option she has ever made, every life she has ever saved, might've not needed to happen if someone had told the evil doer, the bad man, the cold-blooded mercenary, that someone loved them.

"I'm glad you're here."

"You matter to me, no matter what you do."

"I was lost without you."

"I'm proud of you."

** _"I love you."_ **

These are the words that Shepard holds as gospel, the words that she has to believe can save this galaxy. As childish as they might be, as optimistic and perhaps delusional as it might sound, she has to believe that the galaxy can be saved in this way, and not through violence or coercion. Not through Spectres or soldiers. It is a galaxy she has to believe in one day. She has to believe it, because otherwise someone like Mai will appear again one day, and this time it'll be on the wrong side.

She's always known Mai to be an orphan, and for that she's felt for her greatly. What would Mai have been like if she had parents that loved her? What would Mai have been like without Cerberus?

Questions in Shepard's head, and they hit so deep, so personal with her, that there is a reason she is here today.

A reporter named Khalisah al-Jilani scored an interview with her one day, ambushing her during her early days with Marine QRF after Elysium when her legend was just beginning and the fame that came with it. She was a pushy reporter, tabloids and clickbait being her bread and butter, but there was serious purpose behind it. There was someone asking her questions to the very core of her:

_"Tell me, Lieutenant Shepard," Khalisah wanted to end the interview, taken in a vehicle pool at an Alliance FOB, not unlike the one on Altis, "Why do you do the things you do?"_

_It was the first time Shepard had ever been asked that, but she answered so fast, so natural, even she was surprised as she gently took her hand and shook it, the hand not occupied touching her elbow gently. "For the kids."_

"Have they been treating you well?" Shepard flips through a picture book as the kids try to organize an impromptu tea party for her arrival. She insists not to bother, but they insist as well. Who was she to not keep them company? "The Alliance that is?"

The oldest, Daniella, she's the only one brave enough to handle a tea kettle as she pours into plastic cups for all the kids and they make games by holding out their pinkies all fancy like. She looks at Shepard with tired eyes and Shepard sees a brave woman, assuming a role of parent to the parentless, even if she herself was without the care due to her by life. She nods slowly. "Sergeant Izhiman tries, he lets us do our own thing, which is nice. He gets us food too. And shampoo and stuff. I think… I think he fights with his commander a lot."

In her mental checklist, of all the favors asked of her by Admirals and Politicians of the galaxy, they fall asides as she makes sure the next time she's at the Alliance FOB to demand these kids are provided for.

"He's funny!" Bao says in broken speech befit a six-year-old as he comments. "He scared of us!"

Shepard can only laugh at that as Daniella pours green tea into her own cup. "Maybe, maybe he is. Taking care of children is certainly a momentous task. Let alone twenty."

But for Commander Shepard, it's no issue at all.

It's no issue for her to talk about all the times she drives with the Mako and catches sick air, and all the kids pretend to fly like the Mako does sometimes.

It's no issue for her to take a look at a leak in the bathroom that no one else can get to and are afraid to bring up to Sergeant Izhiman because he seems already swamped with work.

It's no issue for her to make a list of what the children need, and to make a note to herself to, next time she's at a high society function, start imparting ideas of adoption amongst those who are able to take care of kids (or at least hire people to do so). Even a distant parent of means is better than no parent at all.

It's no issue for her to tell them this:

"I grew up without parents!" She proudly declares at the children beam because, they can't believe it, they share something with _the _Commander Shepard. "Yep! They were on starships while I was left on Earth! And do you know what happened to me?"

"What?!" The kids yell up at her, eager to know.

She flexes herself as a few kids touch her arm and pectorals. She drops her voice purposefully. "I became strong! And cool!" She lifts several of the kids up in her grasp off the ground and they all laugh and scream and make the sound that kids do when rough housing for fun. "You're gonna be cool too one day! Just watch!"

No one is able to raise Shepard that day, not Sara Ryder, not her crew, not Admiral Hackett, or anyone who had the privilege of ordering her. No one is able to stop her as she makes all the kids walk in a line down the street to the nearest working mess hall, manned by the Citadel in a former supermarket, and gives them a mini field trip full of foreign food and foreign people. For many it's their first-time meeting aliens, and even the busy bodies dealing with the Covenant are able to see the joy of entertaining Human children as they ask so many questions it would make Dr. Solus pale in comparison.

With Commander Shepard vouching no one minds when they pester an Elcor wanting to ride on its back (the Elcor eventually allows them to), or for the Asari to use their Biotics to play catch with them as Shepard relaxes in a world she knows.

With Commander Shepard there, the kids are allowed to be kids one day as she talks to the Citadel liaison to the Council themselves and mentions that, maybe, just maybe, Spectres could do more stuff for the kids. The Salarian scoffs at that as if thinking the Spectre talking to him is kidding, but Shepard's delighted and content face flares a moment in seriousness, and he immediately begins drafting a report on why the children are the future of Spectre public relations.

That day Shepard takes a day for herself, and finds her inner peace to the next sunset.

Cradled between two larger buildings, the orphanage is almost always dark, but she sits on the curb with all the kids that evening as the sun goes down and as the kids start to realize the day is almost over, start to frown and become upset, sticking closer to Shepard she can feel their warmth almost threaten to burn her out. She quickly squashes such sadness though, turning to all of them, looking at all of their faces: "I'm here for a bit! I can come visit again soon!"

And they all cheer, and when Sergeant Izhiman returns finding Shepard tucking them all into bed, he is surprised. "I've never seen them all tuckered out like this! They usually don't have much to do." He whispers to her as they meet again at the mouth of that room, the sound of it soft breathing from a chorus of kids who have had a good day.

She nods. "I know, it's a shame. Maybe teach them how to do Dungeons and Dragons? Tabletop games? Activities and hobbies they can really invest themselves into." She stops, pauses, hands at her hips and reminding herself she is an officer. "Thank you, Sergeant, for taking care of them. I know it's not glamorous, but it's what's right."

"Oh.. uh, of course, Commander." The Sergeant is surprised, this isn't what he signed up for, and it's not what he knows he's good at. He's a Marine after all, but Shepard has to recognize that, in her own way, she wishes their positions were switched. "Oh, hey there Jana."

A small Caribbean girl, braids in her hair that Shepard did herself, holding that N7 doll so closely. First it was her, slowly coming out of bed, even as Shepard just finished tucking them all in, but soon it was some, and then all in their PJs, wrapped in blankets not meant for comfort, but utility. Not the soft and welcoming ones they all deserved.

They're like ghosts, shadows, as they look so tired, and so beaten down. They can't help it, looking at Shepard. Jana can't help but ask the same question that they all have asked those that would come to that orphanage:

"Can you take me with you, Commander Shepard?"

She wishes she could. She wishes she could take all the abandoned children on every world and make a paradise for them all. She wishes that for all that she has done, and will do, to the galaxy, she hopes she can save the children at least.

This beautiful girl asks Shepard to see the stars, and all Shepard can do is kneel and give her a hug, so tight, the rest of the group piles in out of envy. Which is good, because Shepard is fighting back tears, and a mosh pit is a good enough cover.

* * *

They know better than to use people against her this time to test. Instead it's those hovering, tripod turrets. To many in the Admiralty, it's the same story as they witnessed her in the first hours she had been there: what the next step in Humanity, warriors, and combat itself looked like.

The way concrete shatters is the way dust falls; it's in the creation of its cracks that all fail upon each other that Mai sees as she, for not the first time in her life, punches through a wall of building, a bunker prefab set up for her sake as she is told to do one thing:

Show them what _they _can do.

She sees the particles of dust in the slowest motion she had ever known, but not only does she them, she sees through them. She sees the staggered line behind cover that the turrets are set up and the "hostage" (a hologram of a Human tied up on the floor) that surrounds them. Before gravity even kicks in for the chunks of wall, she very much going through it at that very second, her hands clench around a section. She thinks she is faster than the sound of it all, for she registers no sound, as she steps into that bunker and jumps over the hostage. Turrets surround her, and she sees their barrel turn to her mid-flight. She's always known how much mass she can throw around though so her jump is purposeful as she rams into a standing turret and sends it to the ground. As she's on her stomach she has imprinted the positions of the others, two more, in her mind. Automatically her hands go to her two knives as she swipes them out and stands up. Her arms are already coiled, springing out as they send the knives right into the turrets barrel and she brings her rifle up.

The only reason why she went through the wall anyway was to get away from a swarm of turrets coming at her from behind, and she needed cover. She made some.

Her arm locks, ready for recoil as she looks at the hole, the shape of her, become host to those tri-legged turrets.

Blip, blap, bam. Mechanical pieces fly, and she doesn't feel any recoil, or the heat of it in her palm, as a dozen go down and she is left alone with the hostage.

Logic tells her to move forward, to clear the hole, make sure that this little scenario the Admiralty had put together for _them _is done cleanly, however nothing is ever easy.

As she moves past the hologram, it looking up at her like a videogame character, she clears the immediate pathway, kicking asides debris. She hears the ruffle of clothing, the sound of a gun's trigger being touched by a finger's pad.

She snaps around and all those watching swear they hear air snap, and the gunshot, at the same time Mai puts a bullet into the hostage.

"Jesus Christ." That's all Admiral Nguyen can say as she sees, with her own eyes from the observation post inside of the Savannah containment dome, what a Spartan can do. Researchers who had only heard of Mai from the first contact team now bear eyes down at her as she has made an impossible scenario in a kill house into a cake walk.

Mai hears a whistle, not over comms, but in her own head.

It's her new partner. Yet another one given to her by circumstance: Cash.

"You're one fine goat rodeo, you know that?" He rattles in her head impressed like.

Mai finally vents her DMR as the hologram of the traitorous hostage fizzles out, and the adrenaline washes out of her to be replaced by the cold numbness that everyone else feels. She is not one to be tested, but this is a better vent for her than to take it out on the Alliance entirely. The Covenant is there, and she will still, someday, kill them all.

The first few times Mai tries to simply think responses to Cash, however her connection with him isn't that deep. "You operate with Spartans before?" She asks.

"Negatory."

"I see."

"Yeah but we seem to work well together. I reckon that's good on both our parts."

She doesn't respond, but Cash doesn't quite mind. He's seen worse basket cases. The Savannah wasn't his first posting. Far from it.

The Alliance comes in as if she is a wild animal and give her space to remove herself from this makeshift arena, technicians come to pick up the bits and pieces of a Spartan brought to trial. Scientists and analysts wave their omnis up and down her, and it's a blur that she is comfortable with. The ONI techs who tester on her in her later career as a Spartan felt the same. In the shadow of a UNSC ship, with a UNSC AI in her head, Mai, for a moment as she sits on a diagnostics bench with analysts and scientists speaking in languages beyond her, she can pretend that she never left the war.

She's back on Reach, fighting off the Covenant, killing them all. Though that presupposes something she realizes, and it keeps her in her own head as she sits there like a statue:

It would've meant she would've never known JD.

It twists something in her. It's not a knife, it's not a bullet, but it makes her feel.

Unfortunately for her, someone else is also inside her head. "Hey, little lady, what's on your mind." She shifts her head in recognition of Cash's question. "MJOLNIR reads me your chemistry at a moment's notice. I figure as a good AI I let you know your hormones just spiked a little."

Mai gets up off her bench before anyone is done, and no one stops her as their voices rise and never form. She finds a corner, stands in it, and talks to the wall. Before she begins however she raises her omni and searches for something on the net:

_ASMR Earth River 24/7 w/ wildlife and faeries_

It runs, and Cash pegs what she's doing. Just in case of any bugs that might be tracking them as the sound of running water goes. She begins:

"I work alone. I don't like having someone with me."

Cash pauses before answering, not for his sake, but hers. He can't be too fast. "Well, I can be not someone, if you'd like."

How she would've liked to do the same somedays. "No. Not enough. I don't want you in my head."

"…Would you rather me off on my lonesome in some new-fangled Alliance lab?" She doesn't say anything, head looking over her shoulder as scientists draw straws to be the one that asks her what she's doing. "Look. **Noble 6**," She doesn't know what to feel as she is referred to by her last codename. She chooses nothing. "It is clear to me that you are making decisions and having prerogatives that don't exactly line up with the Alliance."

"…Yes." She admits, words like stone.

"Now my opinion is derived from logic put in me by a UNSC, and I am still loyal to them, as true as gold in them hills." He pauses again. "Though I know, more than any other AI 'cept for one fine lookin' lass made in the image of the devil herself, you were also programmed, and that programming ain't too different than mine. I ain't saying this because I'm literally in your cortex, but I know how you feel, Spartan, more than you might think."

Tali speaks of sleepover stories meant to scare children at night sometimes. In her stories, the demons are all artificial, and they speak like them.

To Tali, Cash would be nothing more than the Devil themself. The fear of artificial intelligence is not unfounded, and certainly understandable, but for Mai, Cash is just another AI. A tool that speaks back, and yet, is Human all the same.

She believes him. "I'd rather work with you than without. Especially now. What's a cowboy with no ride, after all?"

"More than just a ride… What do you know, specifically of me, Cash?" She's speaking to a wall but she's inside her own head, and oddly she's more comfortable with this than she would admit. It's easy to talk to something of the UNSC.

He's fast to respond. "Well, I'll explain it right and simple then, straight, from what I can grab. I was given your bio in preparation for Operation Uppercut, along with the other Nobles of course… Same stuff Carter was given. That's what I, Cash, know. Masterson on the other hand…"

"What?" Mai says aloud, perhaps too loud, however Cash is pushing along before she can catch him.

"Spartan, you were used as a test platform for a whole buncha things. Ackerson loaned you out, not that you minded, to Reach for a bunch for things like weapons testing, armor, the usual stuff. You were the filter for the programs that went up to the IIs." Cash is reading out the what of her. "Biggest things were, of course, the Sabre Program because you're actually a pretty good pilot, which is surprising, and of course you were the initial test subject for the SPARTAN neural interface in 2550."

They assured her it was a safe procedure, derived from all the implants done on every UNSC member from there to the Outer Colonies, and, orders were orders after all, she went underneath the knife on Reach and came out with a hunk of metal tunneling into her head. She hadn't noticed it much at all in those proceeding years.

"Not much changed between your interface and the one they just installed on Spartan 117, he got his in a few days before Uppercut, actually… I guess the only real substantive thing is that you're sporting a kinda universal slot. Apparently, the plan was to expand the interface to other things that you could stick in your head, however skunkworks terminated it after tolerances with things other than AIs were, uh, let's just say as reliable as rain in the desert."

"Hm." Mai ground out. "What do you mean, of Masterson?"

"Respectfully. I'll tell you later. Ain't nothin' bad I promise."

"Might not be a later with me." She ground, but Masterson has no sense of fear. Not from her. Not with his personality, his origins, or his programming. Mai can feel the foot get put down and it is a feeling that is unfamiliar to her:

"Look, little lady, I as per my last tasking from UNSC High Command, I serve at the pleasure of the UNSC Savannah and its command staff, most namely its captain, of which you are provisionally. Along with that the only UNSC command structure left to be able to be contacted by me is, of course you, Lieutenant Gul, and Private Durante."

She sniffles behind her helmet. "You're more than able to work outside those parameters, Cash."

"Perhaps, but it has to make sense to me. It has to be logical, and it's logical now that I trust you, Spartan. It's what I'm made to do. **_I trust you. _**It's what I'm made to do. Do you _trust _me?"

She misses talking to JD. It's only been a few hours, he's been given leave and was to meet up with the rest of the Normandy crew on the surface, but his presence is distinctly missing to her. It's a feeling she's not comfortable with overall: wanting someone present, lone wolf as she is, and it cuts at her from two angles. As Cash asks her, she is suddenly cognitive of who she trusts in this world.

She trusts JD.

"It's not you I'm worried about." She admits, eyes on her back.

"The Alliance?"

For a flash of a moment she sees Cash gesturing with his figure over his shoulder, moving the poncho over his arms. It's strange, having someone inside her head like this. It's the feeling of cold air in her nose and clarity beyond the longest of rests. The mental images of her mind are a little more heightened too, and there is a little corner carved out for Cash.

"The Alliance has to be worthy for us to give up what we know. That is what they're looking for." She says.

Cash had a suspicion; he would do the same in their shoes. He knows that he himself has become both a liability, and a bounty. He wouldn't lie if asked that he felt safe with Spartan mental-hideaway hole. "And what are those parameters for them to be worthy, Spartan?"

Her answer was as easy as breath, as easy as blinking, as easy as killing. "Killing Covenant."

This conversation is one to continue later. They heard the footsteps before her motion tracker could pick up the formation of yellow blips behind her:

Admiral Hackett is there again, before her with an echelon of researchers and the other admirals. The best of the Alliance shrink before her, and she is impressed with Hackett for not faltering in the face of her.

A hardened face that has seen war is a rare sight to see amongst the Alliance as a whole, but she finds one in Hackett, and she renders salute.

"Admiral." She didn't need to say anything, Cash picks up after a microsecond. She did it for his sake, identifying who this man was in rank.

"Chief Gul. Thank you for doing these tests for us on such a short notice." He renders a salute as well, as she stands straight. She doesn't respond save for a single nod. "I'm sure you have many questions as to what the future entails for you, especially in the short term, however, let's hit this one step at a time… Is the AI with you?"

In Cash's matrix which he calls a head, a brain, is what the Covenant wanted more than anything in that thirty-year long war: Force deployment, weapons research, _Earth_.

Surprisingly on the other side of the coin, so did the Systems Alliance. It is not in a malicious way he can tell, not that he can surmise anyway, though he supposes as he "stands" before Admiral Hackett that a lot of the Alliance Admiralty is influenced by the fact that he is inside Mai's head now. In the practical sense it meant that Mai stood before the Admiralty and spoke with Cash's voice. There is tangible surprise in the uninitiated as Mai becomes a different person:

"CSH 7000-1, Cash, present." He rattles out through Mai's helmet. "I'll tell ya' Admiral, it's nice to get some change of scenery. Now I usually have the names of everyone on roster at my disposal, but, well, I'm kinda quarantined off at the moment, so who do I have the fine pleasure of meeting?"

Synthesized voice, emotional inflections, presumptions and assumptions rolled out into words as per Human customs. Cash greeting Admiral Hackett is all the confirmation that the Admiralty behind Hackett need.

The Human brain has a significant part of itself dedicated to recognizing other Humans, and here, the wires and twisted and turned, standing before two beings not quite Human.

To be in the presence of Mai was like to be in the presence of the very manifestation of shadow. Her armor wasn't particularly dark, even with its wolf grey paint, and even the onyx visor she had, which sucked light in, wasn't to blame for what it felt like to stand before her: She was the tallest figure anyone there had ever seen as Human. A monster in the shape of a man. She sucked the breath out of those looking at her as if she were one of the old titans of Greece. She was sculpted from death itself, and not in the archaic, demonic, design. She was made lethal in a terrifying way.

The power to kill was in her hand like no one else in history ever had, and it didn't make sense.

It made no sense to anyone there why she instilled such fear in them. Krogan Battlemasters and Matriarchs surely could've matched Mai, and killed more than she ever did, and yet… perhaps it was more personal because they told themselves she was **Human**.

"My name is Admiral Hackett… Cash?"

"Cash." Cash repeats. Mai simply stares straight downward at those that have come to her, she flicking off the sounds from her omni. "Pleasure's all mine."

There is dangerous novelty in it, washing over the Alliance.

AI: Asimov's dreams culminating, as Humanity came into the galaxy, into a nightmare revealed from the very people which flew above Altis right at this very second. What would the Quarians do if they found out a fully functional, fledged, fleshed out AI had been on the surface? Nothing short of a Jihad. Maybe it's their cooperation with the Covenant, maybe it's their vision that Rannoch might be taken back, maybe it's the state of the galaxy with Saren on the loose summoning machine gods and the Geth themselves, but there is fire in the Quarians that match that of faith. The Covenant is a union of faith, with zealots and high speakers and prophets, all the same.

Before them all, the demons that stole heaven itself:

Mai clicks the AI slot at the back of her head, his chip coming out and into his palm as he stood before the Admiralty.

He is proof of one dangerous truth, one that perhaps the Quarians would not hear: that there is a world where AI can be accepted, normal.

And yet… on the flipside, the normal which Cash came from created who held him now.

"If you're going to recruit me to this whole thing you've got going, I'll stop you right there partner, cause I got something to say." His holographic avatar holds his arms akimbo at his hips before going to his hat, held in his hands. "I know what I am, but you treat me like a _man_. Talk to me like one. Not too many sunsets ago, I was one, don't you forget that."

"I… We… We had no illusions on what you are." Hackett began. "We know you're important. As important as Chief Gul and Chief Durante."

"Eh, I reckon a little more." Cash had chuckled, arms out, evidently self-impressed with himself.

Mai had privately wondered why the AI of the UNSC, tools, had always been so colorful. At least Deep Winter's disposition served as a contrast against Ambrose and Mendez.

Hackett could only smirk as he gestured for the two to follow them. "Well, how about we take a walk, you two? I'll let you know what we told Chief Durante."

* * *

Jonathan-Jameson Durante, at eight years old, looks like an eight-year-old. Baby fat still puffs out his cheeks as his hair finally comes into, at times, a fluffy, curly, sticky morass that came with juice boxes and unsupervised eating. He's got a kid-sized flannel with cargo shorts, and little charm off one of the belt loops held there by a clip: It's that of dog, a cute white and brown beagle from a book series about a strong search and rescue dog that saves its friends from the weather, a bad time, and occasionally evil pixies from Mars.

He doesn't need that image when he's looking through the shipping catalogue, sitting on a teacher's desk afterhours in a Cirsium City private school. The room is for kids of course, kids JD's age. Colorful and padded and not to sharp or grating. It's made in love and the image of home. The windows are put over by a digital curtain, instead of the Cirsium City skyline, a grey, boring view of steel and space beyond the glass bubble that encompassed them all, it is instead that of a sunny prairie. The lighting is warm, and the desks and chairs are wood with carpeted floors. Children's pictures, both of and made, are along the wall, especially near the birthday calendar.

JD isn't a student in this classroom, so there is no golden star for where his should be.

Though that's okay, for his birthday is remembered in the heart of the teacher.

On the wooden carved sign neatly put on the corner of the table, a name is spelled out by amber oak letters: **Mrs. Durante**. Said woman is behind that desk now, grading tests.

She doesn't look a day over 35, fit and formed over the physical needs of being a teacher of young children (lots of chasing and cleaning up after them). Light olive skin that her son inherited shines brightly, dressed in a floral pantsuit. She has oval glasses, admittedly worn for the look of it as opposed to any actual need. With dark hair the color of chocolate, tied into a ponytail, she is loved by her students very well.

JD knows of his classmates who, at times, accidentally call their own teacher Mom, but he, nor any of the students that use that particular classroom, have that problem.

Only as an adult he has ever said that word: Mom.

Here, as he is at eight years old after a school day, sits in comfortable silence as befit a classroom for deaf children.

JD's mother was a teacher of deaf children.

The young JD feels a tap at his right elbow and he looks up to his mom, head tilted, she locks eyes as he had known her to do all his life now. Her right hand moves from her red pen, index and middle finger forming a V before touching just below her eye.

At eight he's not as fluent, or as good, as he would be getting older, but to him its as natural as speaking. It always has been.

JD nods, sliding over the shipping catalogue from Earth to in front of her as she puts asides today's math test. His index finger remains on the section displaying pets to ship.

Mrs. Durante isn't as silent as her condition might infer. She's deaf, not mute, and she does make a sound with her mouth. "Oh." She's never heard a word in her life, but she can guess, and smaller examples are still easily emulated. It's a habit that has to be formed, feeling the vibrations in her jaw, making noise.

JD's finger lands on a mousy little Border Collie, bred small specifically for space habitat living.

Mrs. Durante brings her hand to her mouth, covering it as she looks at the cute thing and JD, hope in his eyes, believe this is the time it happens. It hurts her as a mother to say no, shaking her head, as she brings her right hand into a fist, thumb slightly out, swiping forward of her chin as she swipes the wrist across the fist made with her other hand. Both her hands go flat and almost layer on top of each other, the top hand making circles.

JD has tried many times since he was five years old to find a dog, and he keeps trying still. It was a dream unfulfilled by the time he left home as a Marine, however in that moment, it hurts him. JD is a lonely child inherently; an only child with a father working long hours, and a mother who teaches. Mrs. Durante knows, but it is the consequence of many things that makes her say no to her son, even when his birthday is soon.

The war against the Covenant has finally reached, in effect, the inner colonies. Rationing is being considered, and maintaining pets would of course be an issue. There is fear in her that knows that maybe, they won't be able to have a dog, not because they don't have space in their apartment, but because the UNSC is losing the war. Not that young JD would know anything about the Covenant.

It would be a long time until he becomes intimately acquainted.

JD is dejected, his shoulders slouching. He's not a loud child, and for a moment as he grew up, his parents feared that he himself was mute by socialization. He made no noise, no pouting or even crying after he had become a child and not a baby, but it was simply his preference.

She clicks with her tongue, drawing his attention as her finger touches his chin, eye to eye.

JD looks like his mother, more than his father. It's the Venice in her and not the Dublin from his father that flourishes as he became a young man. Not to say JD does not inherit anything from his father: Most of all his own body language, however a 26-year-old JD misses his Mom every time he recognizes her eyes in the reflection of his own helmet.

He's on the verge of some internal sadness, but Mrs. Durante has a remedy. She's been thinking about it, communicating with another parent of a deaf child she teaches.

Her hand moves from his chin to his lips, going flat, vertically, beginning to flap and flick at his mouth, tickling. He is annoyed at first, cringing, but the tickling continues and soon enough laughter comes up as he tries to bat his mother away. It's enough to cheer him up from another unsuccessful attempt to get a dog, but he doesn't leave empty handed.

Her flapping hand remains, left hand touching his elbow as he pays attention intently.

Her right hand's index finger presses upon her temple before going down, thumb and pinky out before transferring to again that flapping motion. She repeats it three times and JD takes it in, emulating himself as, after he does, circles his own index fingers around themselves before one into the opposite palm and then going flat, facing up toward his mother.

JD's mother spells it out, cleanly, and as he realizes what that sign means, her own palms go flat, facing up, going up and down as if weighing something before repeating that new sign.

Her face is expressive, it has to be, and her laugh lines are well worn and used to making smiles and expressions, and if JD wore his helmet less, the same might've been said to him. This woman was the person who raised him, who taught him, who loved him. Loved him enough to make sure that for his ninth birthday he got a goldfish.

* * *

JD thinks of fishes as he stares up at a muted sky through cheap sunglasses. The weather is the most pleasant he's felt in a long time: warm and inviting, but not overly so. His shirt buttons are popped and Liara is more than aware that he is a veteran soldier based on his definition. Of course, she notices JD's tone and fit, but she also notices the tone of about twenty or so other special operators in beach ware. Even Garrus. If her mind were not of ancient gods and the end of life and civilization, she might've been blushing over it.

"Is this what you Humans consider relaxation?" The Turian is so unsure of himself as he tries to emulate the shock trooper as the three of them lay and try to relax. He is emulating JD so much that he is wearing about the same type of Human clothes with the same buttons popped open. Yes, Garrus answers, wearing Human clothing isn't unusual for Turians that spend enough time away from Turians.

On the far side of Altis, an island away basically, facing away from the city and the busy chaos that is a three-way, extra-galactic, inter-galactic, political clusterfuck, JD is unbothered. As long as he doesn't turn around or listening to whatever low dull, reverb that might be nearby that denotes ships, he is okay.

He is so okay that he has bought a stupid touristy floral shirt, popped that open, put on sunglasses, and is currently working through his fifth cigarette of the hour.

It's the Mako which he sunbathes on. Not any Mako, but the Normandy's Mako. Brought down to Earth temporarily: officially, refit of the Normandy needs it off. Unofficially the Normandy crew was more than happy to take the IFV off of their hands and use it to beach bum.

JD is more than able to do so, but Garrus and Liara flank him on his left and right, similarly trying to emulate how JD lies so unbothered.

JD grunts in affirmative. Liara, at least, sitting on the lower slope of the Mako in a borrowed pair of Normandy duty uniforms, sleeves rolled up, understands, though she does so as awkwardly as Garrus in her own way.

How is he the most relaxed one there?

"Teeth on a Mako?" Ashley speaks up as she and a good part of the Normandy's Hitmen crowd around the nose of it either bumming it as well or looking at said nose. "It's too on the nose."

"Yeah well you don't think we're a little too on the nose?" Harris still has his Typhoon LMG, using it more as a cane as he has his impressive bulk shown off in beach going attire. Most of them are: not in swimsuits or bathing trunks, but just down to their skinnies. Some are like JD, spending the time to go into the city and buy whatever stock they have of similarly festive or appropriate attire. Harris tries to make his point as he motions to his own gun and the teeth and eyes painted on its barrel.

"What about a jellyfish?" Bannon asks. She has a paint bucket ready to go. "This little thing bounces like one when Shep drives it, that we know."

Yes, all of them _distinctly _do know that it bounces as much as Garrus, mechanical savior that he is, tries to harden the shocks and shift centers of gravity so that they can avoid getting shell shock from transportation-based concussions.

For a moment Liara considers saying something on how it might be insulting to any Hanar they come across, but she keeps her mouth closed, instead just grimacing, looking over to JD lazily sloped against the turret, eyes to the sky.

She's an empath. Whether by the conception of being an Asari and the particular neurochemical interactions she has with those around her, or her actual emotional understandings of those around her, she is able to sense in some measure the very aura of people. It's not unique among Asari, nor particularly secret, however she can feel it like intuition during a Prothean dig. She feels something pique at her when she looks at JD.

Sunglasses hide his eyes as his chest rises, up and down, slowly. She has seen him asleep many times in the well deck when she comes down to PT, but she has never been this close. It humors her to think of him as some sort of wild animal with her observations, but she can't help to think it true as she sees JD seeming to on the beach with an appropriate uniform for it.

There's something off to him. He appears to be relaxed, he's trying at least, but there is a tensity to him that keep Liara transfixed.

There's only one other person that maintains that peculiarity of being noteworthy in Liara's notice, and that is Shepard herself.

Hitman is comfortable with her, most because she looks good in her given PTs no doubt, but the alternative is of course one of those missing.

It's a beach party in all but name, booze and bare bods with sand and water and warmth, all surrounding a Mako.

Perhaps everyone is not on their guard because Mai isn't there.

Even Wrex, he had his own money. He could afford his own shore leave time.

JD is silent. It is almost loud in the fact that she is that Liara notices.

Mai isn't there, and JD is quiet. Those are two facts she rolls over her head, listening to ocean waves and distant engines. One engine sound hums ever closer and it comes up right against the Mako, and she turns over.

Like an extended family the crew of the Normandy stakes their claim beneath umbrellas and on towels, eating away at actual cooked food and other pleasures.

Delivery bots from Altis have been coming out around the clock for them, and, seeing as Altis is ground zero of… _everything, _they have the beach to themselves.

Another delivery bot has arrived.

"Delivery for Garrus… Vakarian." The VI in the machine generates his name as Hitman generally waves the bot over to the Mako. It levitates over, kicking up some sand to the displeasure of the group, but it settles in front of the three sunbathers on it. "Please sign."

Garrus leans forward, flaring his omni as the bot swings a package from its enlarged compartments out, a delightful chime ringing out at its ocular flares. "Amazon and Delkani Incorporated thank you for using-"

"Skip yeah yeah I'll fill out the satisfaction survey." Garrus is more than willing to hurry it along as he seizes the disposable packaging of something about the size of a small pack. "Didn't know Delkani delivered out into Human space."

Liara knows the answer, and she feels embarrassed that she is some sort of walking encyclopedia sometimes. "Amazon. A Human company. Very similar to Delkani. They have a branch on Thessia working with our own package services."

JD barely has time to remember some of the very first insurgency that the UEG had to contend with on that vaguely familiar name before Garrus is tapping his shoulder once. The feel of Garrus's talons on his bare skin is something that might've been a step too far, personally, but he is warmed up to Garrus considerably. They are friends, right and simple, and JD would be far happy to take as much right and simple things in his life. He turns over and one of the many items delivered is-

He's not quite sure if it's racist, but to him all Turians and Asari look alike. That is what it is with him, but he know's that probably not true and he does his best to try and find ways to tell them apart. The facial markings are one, very helpful thing. Garrus's mouth curves a little more upward than other Turians he's noticed, and he is, perhaps a little more lithe than his contemporaries.

What does definitely set him apart is his visor. It's a targeting HUD, more advanced than his own in the ODST helmet. It's the only thing, according to Garrus, that he's calibrated enough that he doesn't need to toil over like he does the Mako or his guns. Whether it be refinement of the post-processing on its 100x zoom, how well it picks up his vitals and those around him, or even the little music speaker he keeps in it loaded, it's a part of Garrus to the point where it almost occupies the same space as Mai's armor.

He's wearing it to the beach, even now, so its surprises JD to see Garrus holding out a very similar item in front of him. "I've caught you staring more than once."

It's a joke, and he says it in his coy way, but out from Garrus extends in his palm a visor. It's shaped for a more Human head, its metal wrapping around much like the one on Garrus's fringe, and it doesn't bear the wear marks that his does, however even to JD's untrained eye he knows it's the same thing he uses. JD tilts his head, posing a question as he slowly takes it from his hand. It's paper light, despite its construction. The benefits of future materials no doubt.

"I'm a fan of this custom shop, back on Palaven, that makes these visors. Of course, this is just a base model, not like mine, and its made for Humans, but I can help you calibrate it." JD licks his lips, looking it over. Of all the things that he has expected aliens to do to him, give him a gift was at the very bottom. It reads on his face, and Liara sees the question. "Oh, it's when you join C-Sec. Doing your beats in full combat armor isn't really recommended, but having visors are harmless enough."

The future. The future sprawls out in front of JD like a river he's on, and it is too late for him to do anything about the waterfall he hears further down. It sinks him, it widens his eyes with the realization he can look to a future longer than a few days, that he might live longer than his parents, than most ODSTs and Spartans. It rattles him, but thankfully, Garrus takes it as shock. "Don't uh, let it all out at once. I'm allowed to do something nice for a friend."

He feels it over in his hands long enough. His sunglasses are off, and he slips it behind his left ear as he finds a calibration aligner float like a ghostly apparition in his vision. The buzz of his omni on a bracelet he wears goes off, and it is syncing to him.

He's lived with HUDs almost his entire life now, and this new one, it's just another in a long line of HUDs he supposes that he'll keep using, but this one is special.

The smoke and the tobacco, they're thick on his lips and tongue but they fade out. They fade out because he speaks. "Thank you, Garrus." He reaches out, and his hand lays on Garrus's forearm for a moment in a squeeze, and Turian flesh feels more like bark and jerky than he cares to progress before he pulls back.

Hours before, the Admiralty had told him the role he had to play, and the roles he had to assume. He was supposed to be racist toward Garrus, toward aliens. How easy would it have been to say nothing he thinks, but nothing is ever as straight and easy as an orbital drop he's found out.

Garrus turns away and Liara knows he blushes as he tries to play it off. "I'm going back to C-Sec after this as well, so, hey, partners?"

JD doesn't need to say anything to answer in return.

Liara feels it. She feels it clear as this sunny, nice day. She feels it in the same way the Covenant are just behind them all and the whole morass that they represent. All of them are looking forward for the sunny day at the beach, because of the Reapers, Saren, and all of that is imposed on them by Shepard. That is their tension that they do away with on this beach, right now. JD however is different. JD is looking away from a different evil.

Liara is well acquainted with the idea in her work, so she sees it over JD now like a cloud: his only cure after all this time was to simply close his eyes and accept oblivion.

"JD…" She speaks to him. "May I take a walk with you?"

* * *

"Don't mind me I'm used to third wheeling. I prefer third wheeling over being the only alien in the middle of a bunch of Human Marines. This is relaxing, you know, walking along this beach?"

Sometimes JD does understand why people talk like Garrus does: it's to take his mind off things, not that he particularly likes the sound of his own rambling.

"Oh Garrus," Liara's voice is like a soft breath over those very waves. "Your company is never unwanted."

JD is half concentrated on learning his new visor, half concentrated on the feeling of the sand between his toes. It's not often he can feel using his feet, so he is spoiled now with warm sands as they walk away from Hitman. Ashley has started putting together people to paint up the Mako while they're gone, while the rest are starting to finally hit that fun part of day drinking. JD prefers his archaic vice. Slowly, he will make this one cigarette last as long as he needs to.

"Sorry," he breaths words like smoke. "I'm not a big talker. These last few weeks on the Normandy have been a lot."

Liara forces a breath through her nose in amusement. "I quite understand. I've been here too."

JD and her they share a small smile. He knows better than to not just create a line between civilians and him as an actual soldier. When the Covenant came there was no difference. "Right."

Garrus stares out at the blue, sky and ocean touching at the horizon and blurring together like a painting. It honestly is a very nice day, but he can't help but grimace. "Turians and water don't mix, do you know that Durante?"

"Mm. Could guess." JD says in between the smoke, and they pause at a formation of rocks that lead out into the water like a path, finding one that is touched by water enough so it's not blisteringly hot. "I'm not the best swimmer either." He admits. Last time he took a dip in Altis he had to use Mai as his buoy. Before that? Swimming wasn't his strong suit, and he barely passed the ODST baseline.

"Salt gets up in my fringes, and a freshener really can't get all that gunk out. That I don't know how to swim myself. I think. I don't know don't bipedals like ourselves just have an instinct about it?" Garrus goes on, rubbing the back of his fringe to make a point. "There's that one classical Human music album I see at the Human souvenir shop a lot, a Human baby, fresh as the day it was born, just swimming."

Garrus goes into the survival techniques of babies across many species, because it's just something he knows after a certain amount of time in C-Sec, but it gives JD and Liara time to lock eyes as they look to each other: JD is sitting upon a rock, waist high, as Liara pauses and looks him up in a way that he can only know as observing.

Everything about her is blue, he tells himself, even if it is a rather simple observation much in the same way he has messy brown hair and hazelnut eyes. Though there's more to it; it's not a depressive aura she holds to herself, but its heavy, moody, even if she holds a smile upon herself. Innocence. It's innocence in her eye. It's a type of innocence he has to rediscover.

It's the air of her attractiveness that hits him like a brick wall that reminds him that Asari do have that certain biological influence across the galaxy. It does serve to remind him that this is the first time he's felt such a thing stir in him in a long time, though it's gone in a flash as words come out of her pretty face.

"You are… tainted, JD." Liara, there is trepidation in her. "It is similar to Shepard and yet…"

Garrus stops his rambling immediately, and JD reaffirms the gaze he matches with her.

"Liara?" JD asks once aloud, head tilted. He knows now why she wanted to bring him out here alone.

She nods, looking down at the ground as if sorting out her thoughts one last time before continuing. "It is you and Chief Gul both. There is a taint to both of you that is similar to Shepard's… and yet, different."

JD blinks a few times, pausing, taking a drag of his cigarette. He has been described as cool before, so he channels that, keeping cool, finding an answer. "We were awfully close to Shepard when that beacon went off. Maybe it was something resonant."

The Admiralty _did _just remind him to keep his cover story.

Then again, if his cover story was consistently kept by him, he wouldn't be out here with them two.

Liara shakes her head. "Perhaps, but this feels deeper. With Shepard, what the Beacon did to her was applied over her, like a veil, a blanket, covering her being. With you, it feels… permeated. A part of you." She breaths out, tired of speaking in such abstractions. "I'm a scientist. I know better than to speak of such nebulous ideas like aura and the air of a person, but for us Asari, it is a subconscious intuition built into our biology."

A gut feeling. JD nodded with her. He trusted his gut, and it saved his life many times. Why should he doubt hers? "Is this leading somewhere, Liara?" JD stops her, and Garrus, feeling the particular tension, instead looks out to the crystal blue waters, facing the wind head on.

"Do you know of the Asari melding, JD?"

Garrus turns over head cocked as JD processes what Liara just asked, she herself is standing politely, her own head tilted awaiting an answer. Of course, he knew what it was just from Hitman; it was, in impolite terms, a mindfuck in the best way. The biological joining or connecting of two minds by way an Asari technique. It was also, according to the many communique from the Admiralty, something that he would not ever consent to for reasons that JD was more than able to pick up.

"Are there mysteries in me, Liara?" JD asks.

Liara nods once, softly. "To me, it appears so, perhaps related to the Reapers… Perhaps additional information imparted from Mai to you, or remaining in Mai due to the beacon. Maybe the beacon affected you differently." The nightmares which JD has are his own. He knows this. He is, in his dreams, in his drop pod again in the middle of a war that never ended until he came to this place. He has no reckoning which Shepard has. "In any case, I think it would be best for the mission if this process had a preliminary run before, I approach Shepard… Just in case."

It tears at him in a confusing swirl. He likes his women straight to the point, and there's something inside of him that makes him liable to agree with anything Liara asks, but he knows that's just something about her as he runs a hand down his face and thinks of another woman in his life:

There are no beaches on Cascade, so he and Dawn never had a beach day like this.

_"Shame, isn't it?" She says in JD's head. "You woulda killed to see me in a two piece right?"_

If he could speak back to her he would only scoff and say he knows what she looks like out of one.

He wonders if she's okay, back in their universe, at that very second, and the sobering thought of what might be happening to her breaks any of Liara's implicit influence off of him.

"I would not be comfortable with this. I'm sorry."

Liara's eyes track down once, nodding to herself. "I assure you, JD, I have no machinations on peering into your history, anything that might be classified given who you are."

JD hurts at that implication, hands raised. "I trust you… but… I simply can't allow that."

He wouldn't wish his history upon an enemy… Or at least, anyone not the Covenant.

"I understand… but I make no promises I wouldn't ask Shepard to order you otherwise."

There is no great outburst from JD, no dismissal, or anger. Only a nod.

Garrus laughs. "Spirits T'Soni. You really know how to talk to a guy."

All this while, she speaks angelically, but as Garrus calls her out she cringes to myself. "Oh. Uh… Forgive me if I am being overly forward. I… Going from a solitary dig site to a band of Human marines is odd for me."

"Don't worry. I respect that." It's what his father told JD straight up. "My… girlfriend, she's a straight shooter too."

Liara seemed pleased, relieved, hearing that, so she lightens herself, a breath in her throat like the ocean air. "So who is this girlfriend of yours anyway, JD? It seems to everyone on the Normandy you and Mai are an item."

JD blushes at that fact, but to imagine Mai as normal enough to even entertain a relationship, let alone one with him, it disregards so much about her. He doesn't, he cannot, think of her in those terms: as a woman.

No. She is Human, yes, he tells himself every day, every time he's with her.

Though she remains a Spartan.

So he thinks of another woman:

Dawn. "She's the closest thing to walking sunlight."

Poetry and prose has never been his forte but thinking about her has always made it easy for him to turn into a writer. He takes off the visor, running it over with his hands.

Dawn Harris was a strong woman, befit of her job as managing cargo loads on Cascade's cargo elevator. She wore a similar visor device to keep track of everything coming in and out of the dock, and it was a chance meeting on Cascade's space elevator during his own shore leave that made JD liable to love her.

Liara and Garrus are taken aback by the soft language, untypical for JD, at least for them. He spoke like a Marine, despite everything, but reserved and cautious in his words. Here he had been thinking about sun dresses and grassy fields and blue skies and there was a dreamy smile on him that betrayed everything that he had lived through.

He remembers something: grabbed from his locker when they were told the Normandy was going to refit for a little bit.

He pulls it out of the back pocket of his shorts a small little metal case, wallet sized, is taken out. Waterproof, bang-proof, just in case. He flips it open like a card holder, and a neatly folded picture he takes a look at. There's a warm, small smile that forms on his lips as he takes a private moment to look at it, looking up at Garrus after it and handing it to him.

He wants to say careful, but he trusts Garrus as the Turian takes it into his talons, softer than he has ever handled any woman or child. Liara leans over his shoulder, and she sees what Garrus does:

A blonde woman, a candid, silhouetted by blue sky and sunlight along a golden field, in a sundress. She's normatively cute, paler than JD, but she wears her wear on her hands, clasped behind her back as she looks to the sky and…

Whenever JD looks to that picture taken in the Magellan Valley, two and a half years ago, there is no war.

Does he love her? Or does he love being with her? Is it actual romantic love or is it just reprieve from something as horrible as a war with an alien race?

Questions that pass by JD's mind as the cold rolls over as two friends of his look at a woman he looked forward to. A thought: He would never see her again. A worser thought: The Covenant back in their galaxy would kill her, eventually. The worst: The war with the Covenant had been lost, and they were helpless to stop it.

JD looks right, back toward the colony, toward distant Seraphs and Citadel craft and the busy galaxy that he has been thrown into.

"She's very beautiful JD." Liara comments, bringing her hands up to the tendril like growths at the back of her own head. "If I had hair, I would quite like to have what she does."

"You seen her recently?"

JD finally assumes the character that is his normal.

Whatever his answers are to questions that torment him about Dawn, none will ever matter to this galaxy. He only wishes that she would live a good life.

"We had a fight, before I left." This much is true as he looks up the sky. It's a misconception that perfectly blue and clear skies are the best for drops. Cloudy skies allow for more cover. "She didn't want me to go. She said she could pull a few strings with her father that could get me papers of discharge."

The classic story of soldiers and their partners back home. Garrus knows it well as his face hardens up.

"I said a few things in return… We haven't talked since. I miss her."

She was always indecisive about joining the service, about serving Mankind in their great struggle against the Covenant. She would talk herself up, and JD would tell her that war was horrible, and that the fact he had lived for this long was a mistake. After so much back and forth JD's points were eventually turned on himself, and given a chance to leave, he hadn't. In the same way that she wanted to be an ODST like himself, but could never commit, standing outside the recruitment office.

As Liara stares at the bridge of Dawn's nose and sees that it's very much not unlike her own, she sees something else.

It's that same taint on JD.

Her eyes go wide. This picture carries the coldness he does, and she doesn't know what to make of it in her head.

"You going to make it up to her?"

"I don't know if I can. It's uh… We got bigger things to worry about, don't we?" Garrus, more than he should, knows what JD speaks of. This mission is many things: it's crucial, it's for the safety of the galaxy, it's probably the most important thing any of them will ever do, but also, it's a distraction.

It's a distraction to the issues that make them as the shadow of the Reapers hang over all of them.

It's cheating in a way, and yet it is what the galaxy needs of them.

Bigger things indeed as Liara feels the cold again, and she must remember, the next time she sees Shepard, to ask about JD and Mai.

The two soldiers catch the hum of an Alliance Kodiak approaching before Liara does, swiveling around to a few meters away as sand is kicked up and the three of them look away to shield. It's the tell-tale weight of a woman dropping onto sand that clues them all into who has arrived as the Kodiak, as fast as it has arrived, goes off.

The crater of her landing is large enough for her to actually take a step out of, and she does, and for the first time in a long time those present see Mai Gul without her armor.

Her hair is tied back into a pony tail, and she is even more out of place given the fact she is in an Alliance duty uniform on a sunny beach. It is not often she presents as a Human, outside of her armor, and it silences the three of them as she approaches with a plain duffle bag over one arm, eyes fixated on them all as she approaches silently.

They are all frozen: JD holding a visor that looks much like Garrus, and Garrus holding a picture of Dawn, with Liara suddenly taken in with a cold that sweeps over her like a shadow of a black hole.

She says nothing, but she stares as Garrus hands Dawn's picture back to JD and he pockets it.

Moments pass, a lifetime of silence, before JD finally speaks:

"Mai."

"JD." She responds back with his name, saying it only as she could: like a gust, held back.

It's a strange thing, seeing Garrus pretty much twinning with JD with their floral shirts and their visors, and she knows that she will have to ask what's up, and why they are the way they are at this very moment, but JD is always forthcoming with her and she gives her the orders Shepard has given them all.

It's the hardest thing ever asked of her. For every mission she was ever sent on and perhaps every mission she is yet to go on, she knows that this will tear at her greatly:

"Shore leave." JD says, and all Mai can do is draw a long breath out of her nose as her eyes go blank.

* * *

Two weeks go by in a blur.

* * *

"Commander," Pressly salutes her, in his dress blues, as Shepard finds herself a temporary office in the Aqua Sola building, the tallest tower of all of Altis, and asks for a room, specifically, without windows. She gets a cubicle like many of the Alliance offices there, and she keeps her nose down as she tries to pass the time by doing the work expected of her as an officer. Even when she is a Spectre, hunting down Saren, she still has her position in the Alliance to fill out reports, make commendations and recommendations, and fill out the office work that she might've been able to avoid on the Normandy. She looks up from her VI accountant display. She's actually _really _good with money apparently, based on how payments are going from her Spectre account into the Normandy's gear. "Effective immediately, I am tendering my official transfer request."

The dull work of bureaucracy has its shocks as Pressly stands there as she sits like any office worker. "Oh my… Pressly? What's wrong?"

Pressly shakes his midaged head once. "Nothing, Commander, I just believe that I am not what you need as an XO. The Normandy is not a regular arrangement and Lieutenant Alenko can easily acclimate to my duties better, just as you did with Captain Anderson."

"This isn't because of your concerns about me, is it?" Shepard asks earnestly, standing, trying to avoid the low walls separating cubicles and the gaze beyond of the Solace and the Covenant. "I assure you, your actions were what I would've done, had I been in your place."

Pressly smiles dimly, closing his eyes as he holds the physical papers in his hands. "I appreciate that Commander, and I am glad I have had the experience of serving beneath you and the Normandy, however I'm not what you need. I'm an old man with old habits."

Shepard never likes it, to hear people speak low of themselves, especially when it's not true, so she reaches out, touching one of his elbows. "You're a good sailor, Pressly, one of the best. If it's your judgement that you would request a transfer, I can only support you."

It is mercy which Pressly feels as Shepard takes the papers in his hands.

He feels like he has been spared as Shepard motions him to the seat across from her desk, pulling up ships and posts she would gladly reccomend Pressly to.

* * *

"I'm fine! I'm serious!" Ashley slams her mug down as JD sits next to her at a dive bar near the hotel the Normandy's crew has unanimously, mostly, taken to. Wrex is missing in the city but Kaiden, now the Normandy's XO for both Marine and Shipboard activities, assures them that he is fine.

When Hitman comes into that bar, they clear it out save for themselves, and they make themselves the bar tenders and patrons. No one dares correct them. JD sips on his vodka and coke as he looks at Ashley disapprovingly. "That's not the best, and you know that."

"Every Geth I put in the ground is what my team on Eden Prime deserves. Hitman has told me right: We're here for a reason… Have you ever lost a squad before?" He's lost squads, platoons, battalions, ships, planets before. All he does is nod. "What have you done then? How do you deal with it?" She's angry, she's got her hair down, and JD has seen her before in ODSTs like him, who have survived drops and campaigns.

"I remember." Is what he says as he lets that night continue into a haze.

* * *

It's not an ambush, not an attack, but it's moonlit and cold and they are all sprayed with water as three bodies splash into the beach's tide as it rains down. Sand is clumpy and gritty and Hitman is covered with it as two, then five, then ten at a time try to take Mai down on the beach with their bare hands.

The only one not fighting is Doc as he reserves his strength to drag Hitmen back, despite themselves, making sure they don't break anything permanent.

It was a final idea put forward by Emerson on behalf of Hitman: give us this fight, and we'll leave you, mostly, be.

Hitman craved the fight they saw with Wrex, that feeling that they could've done better.

They didn't.

Mai feels a tooth get lodged into her elbow and stuck there, ripped from the swipe she did against Harris, his large body hitting the sand with a thud, leaving an impression of his body that kicks up its own blast of sand against those who have collapsed before her and those who are trying to get up.

She wipes the tooth away with a swipe of her hand as Bannon and Emerson try to pounce of her, but she palms both of them before they can land on her, sending them to the ground as Emerson's legs get grabbed and he is tossed meters into the water by Mai.

Someone breaks a piece of driftwood against her back, and she balls a fist, throwing it back as she feels it break into a shoulder of an offending Hitman. The scream is covered by rain and wash as below her feet, the bodies of men and women writhe in pain as Mai's blue eyes burn in the dark.

She is a wolf in the dark.

Hitman tries their best to crawl to her, their hands are at her legs and thighs trying to claw up, but she is unmoving like a stone, looking down on them all, as she thinks the only reason she is not breaking their offending appendages is because shore leave doesn't last forever.

The only thing that lasts forever is the battle in her soul, alone.

She howls, and there is not a pain on her that indicates she has taken down a platoon of special forces. The more things change, the more they stay the same, and as the echoes go on, no one answers, and Hitman as a whole collapse silently.

* * *

Chakwas silently removes the syringe from the chemo-stimulant induction vein on her suit, and Tali breaths out relieved as Shepard and Garrus look on at her side in the Alliance FOB. The Quarian has returned, the only child of the Flotilla to answer to someone else now as the times change.

"I don't like needles." Tali squirms, moving her arm which she had just taken the Marine strength vitamin and booster concoctions. "Hoohhhh keelah. That hits… something, in me." Her voice is vibrating as she feels the sensation of her body try to take on a lot of new supplements.

Shepard crosses her arms, not hiding her frown as the Tali before her is not the Tali she saved from the Citadel.

Her suit alone is not the same: The fabric of it is deeper in violet, with swirls representing the cosmic wind written into it, a honey-comb pattern having replaced the synthetic skin of it where fabric isn't. Her hood is of the same material, buttoned at her collar. Her shoulders however, are covered entirely by a fabric covering, the same swirling designs on it. It's almost a top overcoat, almost a poncho, rimmed with metallic strips that accommodate what those on the outside cannot see:

_"This was my mother's utility cloak." _She explained when she first got back from the Flotilla to Shepard on Altis. _"She was an engineer on our scout ships before…"_

Shepard tells her she doesn't need to explain as instead she is focused on the rest of her new suit. In a hard-plastic on her hip, it's a holster meant specifically for shotguns, with a sidearm holster on her left pelvis for a cross draw. At her boot: a knife.

"With you Shepard, I know in my bones that I will be able to get to Rannoch first." She says after Chakwas speaks medical jargon that she hopes Tali will listen to. Her body isn't exactly conditioned for a Marine's supplement as prescribed to the Flotilla's own forces, but she has requested the regiment anyway. "I still want to help you stop Saren and his Geth."

"Tali…" Shepard drags on, she doesn't know what to say for once in her life. This is a child she is letting go to war with her.

"You saved my life, Shepard. You have my loyalty."

Garrus stirs besides Shepard, just being in the area to catch her on an off day on this leave. He hates tension, so he has made it a part of himself to be able to cut it, or, at least, try. "Hey Doctor Chakwas, I don't suppose you have any super Turian drugs for me, right? You know one day Chief Gul might come after me and uh, I'd like as many advantages as I can."

Tali giggles, Garrus uncomfortably shrinks as Chakwas rolls her eyes, and all Shepard can do is stand there as she is seeing a soldier become made.

* * *

Mordin is busy as ever in his medical office, so even he has to open his windows once and a while to get in fresh air, but when he does that day, he looks across the Altis street only to see, of all things, a Krogan.

Urdnot Wrex leans against the wall of a building across the way, and stares at Mordin in mid-day.

Mordin has long since tucked away fear. He's not afraid to die, he's not afraid of pain. All important conditions to fighting Krogan as a Salarian. He feels nothing but pause as Wrex looks across the street at him, only to be gone when a Covenant Shadow transport slowly crosses the street between them, and he is gone by the time it passes.

There is a city, being built in the shadow of the Solace. The Covenant's platforms, held together by walkways sprawl out like the great ancient fishing villas of Sanghelios from a different era. It is like a web, being built out into the water from the Solace. Repulsors are set up along with gravity-lifts jury rigged to create a nominally tide-free zone around the Solace where the water is almost completely still, and, from afar, as the Engineers and the Grunts work on these constructions, they appear to walk on water.

Perhaps most central, in the sunlight of Altis, is something fashioned in the shape of the ancient history of the San'Shyuum. It is a half-circular arrangement, about the size of a stadium, seats oriented toward a center platform, it itself hosting a large, circular table. Sun shades flutter in the wind, bending light itself, and instead of the Covenant's typical deep hues and purples, the color here is of white steel and silver metal. It is almost blinding in the light, but it evokes the color of the ocean, of paradise.

Admiral Shala'Raan vas Tonbay would have no point of reference to understand, fully that this was a departure from the methodology of High Charity, but every Covenant needs it Council, and she is before one now.

The term Council however rubs shoulders, and indeed times have changed, their circumstances. There is a new term for the main hierarchy of the Covenant now in that galaxy, and it is a term that is translated best in the Human tongue:

The Round Table.

Covenant Councilors sit in the winged seating arrangements for the first time in the first congregation of the Round Table of the Covenant, and on that Round Table are the new Lords, helmed by the High Prophet of Destiny.

The Lords of the Round Table are unsurprising: Half are of the Solace's former command staff, Sangheili mostly, with choice representation from the Jiralhanae clans, along with representatives from the other species of the Covenant. The other half is of the Covenant's main leader race: The San'Shyuum. New prophets have been coronated, new positions made, and understandings brought to bear.

Destiny speaks to all of the Covenant for one final time prior to this congregation of their new Round Table: _"We may be split off from what we know as the greater Covenant, but given what has been done to us, and the great factors that have divided us from the Great Journey as we knew it, it is with solemn notice that I decree that, unless by way of divine miracle which we cannot force, we are the Covenant now."_

The way has been closed off, war pushed aside, bodies shift, a Great Journey delayed. It is a fate by which the Covenant must abide.

Interestingly enough Covenant communication technology and the standard quantum telecommunication interfaces are similar enough that there is little difficulty in the holographic image of Tonbay stood on the Round Table, before the Lords of the Round Table.

"You have to see that even we Covenant, must rely on those outside of our favor." So said the High Prophet of Truth as, the final point of this congregation, a communication with the Flotilla, was underway.

Tonbay tilted her head at Admiral Koris, he was the one who pressed the issue: "I understand that it would be best for us to continue preparing for the reclamation of Rannoch, I more than anyone understand that time is on our side, however is it really best to set our pace to that of a Human Spectre?"

Admiral Koris of the Quarian Admiralty had always been lukewarm with outright conflict with the Geth, and, nowadays, there had been more and more stacked against him in avoiding the final crusade in his lifetime. No, to Koris, and indeed the galaxy, the final battle that would take organic fleets beyond the Perseus Veil seemed no more than hours away, day by day. That was the fever pitch that was amassing on Altis as scout ships and groups were sent to spitting distance of the Perseus Veil and keeping the rest of the Flotilla aware of Geth ships, either being intercepted, or having broken out into the Attican.

Every day Quarian Marines would engage Geth pickets in space and on land, and the Council had, for the first time, allowed them to do so.

All this because of the backing of a new galactic power.

Destiny bobbed his head once, the ivy crown sprouting its greens. "I have met Commander Shepard, I have learned of her from the Alliance. If you know who she is, it is clear as the stars that she will create an opportunity for us. My military lords affirm as such." Destiny looked over to the Elites of the table, and they all concurred. "We have no such insight beyond the rest of this Galaxy, and although we may very well be ready to throw ourselves into the Veil and reclaim the shared homeworld of your people, and the Elites, we can afford to wait."

Admiral Gerrel on the other hand had been displeased with the same sentiment, on waiting for this one individual on a mission, but in the opposite direction: "Respectfully, we've seen what your troops can do, High Prophet, the expertise you have provided us and your upgrades you've passed through our engineers will blindside the Geth! We cannot afford to wait. Our scouting ships drift near Omega even now, and the Geth might be observing their changes."

First it had been the little things: The shield improvements, thruster refinements, 5% efficiency boosts across the board, which was a remarkable thing given the myriad of ship types in the fleet. Small notices such as Engineers peering into Mass Effect drives, ship systems, and immediately squashing bugs and mistakes made by ship builders no longer alive or who never cared. Nothing that the Quarians couldn't have done themselves over time, but there had to have been something given to them in light of the relationship between Quarians and the Covenant.

Then came the promise of troops, of manpower, of training and equipment. The Migrant Fleet had its Marines, had its military, but not an actual army able to take land, hold land, perform conquest. Marines and trainees from the Migrant Fleet wave by wave came down to the Solace and observed and trained along the elite warrior veterans of a conflict that they heard only in whispers and hinted at in the way the Covenant looked at the Alliance with leers and malice.

Tanks, and combat aircraft, transports and logistics capability: the weapons of warfare four hundred years in the future, based on ancient technology risen from ancient gods not Prothean.

Nothing to say of the Covenant themselves: fierce beasts if not acquainted. A single Elite could take on a platoon of Quarians. A Brute? They could eat them. A pair of Hunters could overrun a ship, and Jackals and Grunts were thrown into the fodder in a way incomprehensible to any military commander in the Fleet. Manpower, something precious to the Quarians, was given to them.

Now, at last, technology has started to be crossed over. Nothing as dramatic as Slipspace technology, not yet, for the Alliance has already been given a drive of their own and nothing has come of it, but it's personal shields overlapping kinetic barriers, anti-grav technology meant to improve loadbearing and infrastructure, firearms that seem almost tailored to eliminate synthetics. The eventuality, the inevitable idea of the Covenant sharing its technological marvels has finally arrived, and yet no great enlightenment has happened, no cure for the millions of problems that the Galaxy has is found, just a sneak peak at the true power of a Covenant that called itself an Empire.

All this just in exchange for an obsolescence of their own making:

"Is it not in your interest as well?" Gerrel speaks, almost begging. "Rannoch-Sanghelios will be taken, and thus, **this fleet will be given to you!**" Above them all, above the Solace, was the largest collection of ships in galactic history.

That was the deal the Quarians made. As many ships from the Flotilla that would survive the final crusade would be given over to the Covenant for their own usage, for in exchange, the Covenant had given back their homeworld. There would be no more need for a Migrant Fleet after all.

"One of the tenants of our Great Journey is patience, Admiral Gerrel." Destiny speaks in his angelic, wizened tone. "We have waited over a thousand years for our own, and I assure you, you can wait a mere few months if it comes to it."

Admiral Tonbay thinks of the Elite Ranger she has borne her flesh to often. His name was Ke Nazhumee, and he had been tasked with the Covenant spec ops force along with Shipmaster Karonee and Commander Tahamee as the single Covenant ship still spaceworthy makes a tour of the galaxy. "What is the great plan, Prophet of Destiny?" She says, cutting in between the two Admirals. She says as someone who has interacted with the Covenant, not from the top down, but from the bottom up. Ke was not as Destiny is. "Why are you, as the Covenant, helping us?"

It's a bold question, a simple question she asks, dripping with intrigue and seeking the deeper knowledge of them. What deeper knowledge is there for her to know, Destiny thinks to himself. That they had gone to war with Humanity? Everything else, everything about the Covenant, had been borne to the Galaxy plainly.

It's a question she has to ask however.

This galaxy is full of political drama and questions that the Covenant has not had to deal with, at least outside of itself, in millennia.

Destiny is the one ordained to speak on behalf of them all. The councilors look on from the stands as the lords look at one another, wondering what Destiny's answer would be. These new titles, these new understandings of who they are in contrast of a galaxy that does not answer to them, they are silent because they do not know. As in this time the centuries since, the Covenant looks to its Prophets: "There is no great revelation, Admiral Tonbay, no great secret to our plans here in this galaxy. There is only us. There is only the Covenant." He floats down from his gravity chair, but he does something more. He steps onto ground with his feet, his not so long gone as to have atrophied away, and he steps toward the Admiral in the little space between chair and table, made of Forerunner metal recovered. "In our thousand-year history, there has been no challenge too great, no journey too long, that we as a whole have ever failed to confront. The enemies of the Great Journey all fell, like they always do, and it is our duty to see as many in this galaxy on this greatness as well. That is what we have been imbued with the **_Mantle of Responsibility_**. We are the **Reclaimers, **and so we shall reclaim a homeworld, and then we shall reclaim the next, and the next, and the next, until we can be made _whole_ again."

And the chorus of chants rose in agreement around, voices raising above the ocean in unison. A unison that none in that galaxy had known.

It is, after all, a covenant. Tonbay can do nothing with the rest of the Admiralty than follow the lead of Destiny as they accept this answer, and shut communications. Before they do however Tonbay looks up through her display and sees this new arrangement the Covenant has on Altis.

Metal vibrates with the triumphant shouts and decrees of a people who know war.

Above them all, constructed out of ancient metal in the vision of the holy, a giant ring hung over this round table: It was said by the Covenant be a gateway to the eternal afterlife.

They call it: Halo.

* * *

"Oh man this is freaky as hell!"

At the bar one night, Joker is held aloft by all of the Normandy's biotics, and, interestingly enough, Kaiden is also one of them. Laid back, the Marine lieutenant isn't actually such an uptight guy the Normandy crew discovers. That being said the humble pie that has been force fed to them through cracked teeth and pains the likes of which would've killed lesser Marines has changed their opinion on a lot recently.

Shepard hasn't been around much during this shore leave, but it's not out of the ordinary. She is busy, and Hitman recounts that Commander Ryder, Alec Ryder that is, was much the same on their own shore leaves. Which leaves them to use their biotic powers in a cleared-out bar to float the very fragile pilot of the Normandy.

It's warmly lit, and most nights for Hitman and the Normandy's crew have ended here. Some treat it as an actual bar, some use it to people watch: looking out the windows of the small, hole in the wall establishment to see Citadel and Covenant personnel pass.

They are more interested in the Covenant when they're not constantly drunk.

JD is more than familiar with the Covenant, but it's a peace he has to maintain, so he simply sits in the corner seating of the bar, the bench going all across, and sits in the shadow as Hitman cheers on the impromptu monkey-in-the-middle routine that Kaiden has been egged into with Joker as the tossed object.

He is hollering, and hooting, and JD thinks that a pilot like him should be more familiar with how to fly, but he makes no comment as he sits alone with a bottle of vodka in his hand and a bottle of soda nearby. He nurses both, making the cocktail in his mouth as yet another lazy day on shore leave passes by. Two weeks, officially, but it drags on, and he's not sure how long it is until they're expected to be back out there.

Hopefully Saren is also taking a time out.

The aliens, and he is so remised to even refer to them as that anymore, are retired away to their own relaxation that evening. The sunset glows through even the window, despite the fact there is no clear view of the sky. Garrus, Tali, and Liara are somewhere on their own, and he can't blame them. To be away from all of them after being in such relatively cramped accommodations such as the Normandy is something he would do too if he hadn't been a Marine.

Though tonight, tonight there is something inside of him that compels him to also have his time alone.

He's not too far into it, at least compared to when he does regularly drink, so by all means he thinks its perfectly reasonable for him to put on a puffy jacket and slide the two bottles into inside pockets.

Hitman doesn't notice when he slinks out of the bar, and he doesn't want to be there when someone drops Joker and they have to go get a new pilot. Unlike Pressly, Joker is a bit more complicated to replace.

Walking in fatigues, a bomber jacket a few sizes too big but was the only one the local clothing store still had left, JD walks the streets of a foreign city alone with the buzz of alcohol in him.

Altis is a city of soldiers now, soldiers and security personnel and diplomats and jesters. Very few from the original population remain, so fewer of Altis's accommodations remain open for business. Stores and restaurants have been coopted, acting as PXs and mess halls, Covenant and Quarians walk side by side speaking of needs and logistics that the Flotilla above needs. He does his best, but his skin, his hair, pricks with electricity each time an Elite passes.

He didn't know what it would do when an Elite passes by him and does not see him as an ODST however: they ignore him. Even the Grunts, dragging around carts on the streets, do nothing to notice him as he walks like a normal man. He's used to their screaming. Emboldened by the drink, he stares at one resting on its butt on a corner, rocking its head back and forth.

The Grunt eventually notices. "Uhhhhhh can I help you?" It speaks to him in its high scratchy voice in a language he can understand, and he is transported back to his home on Luna and the Cirsium City. How many times have annoyed pedestrians said that to him as they brush past him on busy streets?

The fact that the Grunt can form those words, can have those thoughts and feelings, the same as any man or woman he had ever known… No MPs are looking as he takes a swig from his cold bottle as his feet lead him away from the city, toward the sunset.

There was a particularly nasty campaign on the Jenolan Belt, closer to Reach's system than the Covenant had any right being. A tropical planet had been the site of another ODST operation for him. It was the only time he had been in charge of a drop; that was the scale of it as UNSC ships threw themselves at the Covenant positions in a fury yet unseen in that war. The Covenant had been getting too close to Earth, and for once in the war, it felt like an even fight.

He can't help but think that the sunset on those planets in the Belt had been much like those on Altis.

He remembers his first sunset, as he steps on the beach and feels the remnant of the day's heat. It was his first day at Marine bootcamp, planetside. On Luna, there was no sunrise as Human beings had known for all of history, but on that dinky little planet out of the Sol System, he saw what every new day was supposed to look like, and what the end of one did as well.

It is in his daze, his memories, he has walked outside the colony, to its many beaches and going right to the water's edge and staring out at a setting sun, thinking it will give him a peace of mind and a relatively nice evening to himself.

He does not notice someone he should until it has taken far too long:

Looking left, he locks eyes with a woman he hasn't seen all that much of on shore leave.

Her duty uniform pants are rolled up to her knees, avoiding the swell of water, as she is barefoot in the sand. Besides her: a collection of rocks. In her hand: a rock.

He's not so far to the drink that he doesn't know what she's doing:

Skipping rocks.

"Mai." He speaks loud enough for her to hear (which isn't much at all). She tilts her head at him, and that alone beckons him closer to her.

"JD." She says in greeting, holding a smooth stone in her hand.

"I… haven't seen too much of you, recently." He's heard recently of Hitman's recent beat down, and because of that, that was the last he had heard of Mai asides from glances at his peripheral vision at mess halls and in the hallways of their hotel. They have separate rooms, and he's not quite sure which one she's in anyway. He didn't question it. Why would he need to? Their relationship has always been of unspoken needs and unspoken understanding. It's not more than a week he figures, but something settles in him weirdly on the fact that she's not been in his presence recently.

"Is that an issue?" She says, stone cold as always.

She flings a rock with frightening speed out into the waters coming in, but it hits the water like an artillery shell, and she scowls to herself before leaning down and picking up another stone.

_Frisbee._ She repeats in her head. _Frisbee._

She still doesn't really know what a Frisbee is, but apparently some of the grenades the Alliance uses are shaped like one.

"No, no… It's just…" He doesn't know what to say, so he says nothing at all. Maybe that's just how it is: It's easy to be with Mai on active duty, because that is their closest normal. Without it however? She is a stranger, to him, and to herself. "Do you mind?"

She sees as he kneels down, taking off his jacket onto the finely flat sand with two bottles wrapped up in it, hand reaching for one of her rocks she has gathered. She shakes her head once. "I do not mind." He looks, with hands trained, even when she smells that sterile smell and sugar on his breath, on how easily he grabs a rock and slings it out against the water, skipping it down. "Why have you come out here?"

It is a testament to their relationship that he does not take that question as coldly as she says it. She doesn't mean it. "I needed some fresh air."

So did she.

It's not easy, being told to just sit still for two weeks, but those are orders, so she bides her time beneath the blackness of sleep and the waking hours where she, perhaps a little shamefully, locks herself in her hotel room and refuses to look out the window. To look out would be to see the discretions of a Galaxy.

"How is he, the AI? We haven't talked about it." JD wasn't there to see Mai tested, but he was given new imperatives, new reminders about their conditions on staying on the Normandy. No doubt she has as well.

"He is… going through debriefing right now, as we did." She says slowly.

"Does he agree with what we're doing? What's going to be done?"

She is silent, but her nod starts an answer. "He knows better."

There is a rhythm between them that is familiar as they alternate between skipping rocks at the setting sun. JD's hands are graceful in how they curve each rock out across the water, and each time he does, Mai's only ups her speed in each toss to her own detriment. She is so used to being able to copy JD's hands, that now, failing, it aggravates her.

Aggravates her to entertain even this: JD takes the glass bottle of store brand Vodka out of his jacket, taking a slug of a gulp. Mai will never understand why people look so in pain when they do take to the bottle, but she understands why they do at all. JD offers, silently, the bottle. There's enough left for the both of them, and, for both of their sake, he dumps the rest of the soda into the bottle messily before shaking it up.

For a moment Mai thinks he is making a Molotov cocktail, for those are the only cocktails she knows. Fire is actually a threat to her shields from Insurgents, and the Brutes were known to use napalm grenades. The concoction which JD throws together isn't that dangerous however. She knows better.

In her hands she has no problem holding it with one hand, taking it to her mouth and drinking as she usually does: as much as she can at once. It's a monstrous gulp, one that fills with JD with chuckles, but she is not as taken aback by what she knows what will eventually happen.

Once before she did drink with JD on Earth, so she should be, theoretically, better now.

The sourness, the sting, of the alcohol is soothed over by the soda, and she is okay after she winces once and feels JD's hand on the bottle to take back. "Not had huh?"

"Is this, eugh-" She actually made a noise of discontent, like a child, and JD couldn't help but save it to his memory. "Is this something you really enjoy?"

He shrugged. "Depends on the company."

The idea of the company she kept is something new to her, given who she was. The idea of company brings her to something else given the new arrangements put upon them, likely at the end of this shore leave.

Maybe, she fears, this is the last true alone time she'll have with JD.

She has to ask: "What do you think of the AI? Of AI in general?"

JD skips another rock as he considers, seeing it get swallowed by frothy white tide. The sun warms him against salty breeze. "Cash seems okay." Is all he gives, and it bugs her. She knows she's tight lipped, but if JD has any further insight, doesn't she mean anything to him to at least go a little further in elaboration? "Given what they're doing with him, and what they're doing to us, I don't mind."

Mai does mind, but if JD doesn't… She supposes she will have to deal with it. "But why?"

"Hm?"

"I just- I-…" She drags off, tossing another rock unsuccessfully in the water. "I just want to know your opinion. I want to understand you better."

It's an odd way to put it, but he is glad that she asks at all. The only problem is that his opinion is from some placer deep in him that he is only considering because the booze inside of him mingles with his propensity to be nice to her. She deserves as much of him as he can garner as he takes another small sip, staring up at the mellow sky again.

"Our AI. They're… They're not different from us, really." He is careful to say. So much time hearing about the dangers of AI in this universe, and he can't help but think of Tali in this moment, and yet he still knows another way that question could've been answered. "They've been good to me."

He always says please and thank you with them, at the very least. It's different than other people, who pay them no mind, pay them no courtesy even if they walk the walk and talk the talk of being men and women. Some AI accept the fact, some understand they aren't Human, but many assume the image of, and JD treats them the same, and he explains why to Mai, looking out at a sunset:

"It was on the Johnny Appleseed, the frigate that rescued the survivors of Persei. It was just, a huge mess of them running scans and medical procedures on us, making sure the civilians were okay and us Marines sane. The intel people, they sat us down, took every single piece of info we remembered about the battle down and tried to find out if we were cowards because we survived, and-" JD seemed winded, talking aloud. He hadn't been used to this at all, speaking so openly about this particular part of his life, but it was for Mai, so he didn't mind. "I don't remember the name of the Appleseed's AI. It was probably Johnny Appleseed himself, and I remember during all the procedures and all the debriefing he was just off to the side, just waiting for me…"

Just a teenage boy, no shirt or shoes, but denim overalls and a stray hat. That was the AI of the ship that bore his name, funnily enough. How often did that happen, he wondered.

"But, I think it was two days after, he had finally caught me in the Appleseed's ODST bay. I wasn't an ODST then, but Appleseed didn't have any ODSTs, all dead… It was quiet and- and, he popped up on his pedestal, and waited for me to notice… By God, I was tired Mai, and I know he was busy, but he _waited_." He made the time for him. He made the time and JD could not have appreciated that so much. As time went on, as comrades were given only moments to say goodbye to brothers and sisters in arms, bleeding out with seconds to spare, JD appreciated with all his heart that an AI had given him time to tell him this:

_"I'm sorry. But your mother has passed away. Heart failure."_

She died of the shock and despair from being informed about how he had been MIA at Persei, a planet that had just been Glassed. She had died because she had thought her son had been killed.

He doesn't remember the hours afterwards, the days afterwards, the transfers he takes as he is delivered back to Luna for the last time in his dress whites and people thank him for his service. All he remembered is seeing his mother for the last time before she was cremated, and how fast he had wanted to leave Luna forever. They buried her with his father, and after that, JD had went back to war.

"He told me my mother died. He gave me as much time as I needed, as much help as I needed. He organized everything he could to make my transfer back home easy… He didn't need to do that." It was something so Human: empathy. How many times has he held dying ODSTs in his arms? How many times has he tried his best to make their passing as soft as possible? From time to time, JD thinks back to the Johnny Appleseed's AI. He hopes that when he dies, someone like that AI will be there for him. "I know it's not much, but, because of that, I know I can trust our type of AI."

He takes another sip of his bottle, offering it back to Mai as she listens captivated. It's not often she hears him go on like this, and to hear it for tragedy, it makes her feel bad for asking. "I'm sorry." She croaks out, taking the bottle.

"It's alright. It's okay." He breaths, taking another rock and tossing it out. He hears her sip, considering something in her mind, looking at the bottle.

She is right to wait before she speaks again. "You are… lucky, JD."

"Hm?"

"You know the fate of your mother."

The last memory she has of her mother is her being drugged and left in a trash pile. How she had not snapped at ONI, at the UNSC for it, JD will never understand, but it is no matter now. It is the saddest Mai has ever heard and it's barely a variation on her voice.

New Jerusalem was the site of a Covenant incursion before Reach. A partial glassing, but enough to significantly damage much of the city. Before that: the internal strife between the ethnic minorities and religious denominations. Mai, deep down, knows her mother is dead. However, all her life she has been trained to confirm kills. She wants to know if her own mother has been spared her life.

"Oh Mai." It falls out of his mouth without his consent, and it makes her look at him. Her eyes are sad, and distant, and she cannot hide it as there is no helmet for her there now.

"Was it… hard? Processing her death?" She sounds so little.

He nods. "One of the hardest things I've ever done."

He left Luna as a Marine, with his mother, screaming at him, pounding at his back with her hands. She has never screamed at him in his life, she has never screamed, but as he stands at the terminal for a transport ship to cart him away to bootcamp, she screams words she has never heard before as JD does the most-selfish thing he can do: become a Marine.

He never forgave himself.

Between the wishes of his mother, and one of the last things his father ever did for him: sign his consent papers to be allowed to become a Marine, he chose to become a Marine, leaving his mother behind.

She died for it.

He prays to whatever gods there are that he never has to answer why, exactly, he became a Marine, because he has no real answer; no answer that justifies leaving his widowed mother.

The cold glass meets his lips again and he shakes it off. Perhaps the idea of him dying young sits well within himself because of what he had done.

"I'm sorry, if you wanted to sign, by the way," his free hand does the motions, signing as he speaks. "I just don't sign while drinking."

"It's okay." She has taken in his words, precious as they are to her. "It is nice to hear you speak, JD. I am sorry for making you talk of these things however."

"No. No. It's okay. Honestly Mai." He shakes his head at her, the swell of cold and sadness beaten back. These are things he thinks of himself often, and Mai does not need to bear the weight of putting it on his shoulders more.

The bottle is passed, back and forth, and it's easy, and it's comfortable, and it's nice to simply skip rocks with each other as the sun keeps its low path down. Altis's rotation isn't the same as Earth's so sunsets last longer than the standard, but they don't mind. They don't mind sharing a sunset and dragging it out. To Mai, the color is spectacular. It's beyond the grey and steel of her childhood, and it's an aspect of life she never noticed before in war. Here she is, standing before one, and with all her senses tuned for combat they are turned to simply, eventually, appreciate it.

How easy it was for her to occasionally steal a glance at JD's face as he fully appreciated the view as well, though her conditioning betrays her like it always does.

Glassing.

Of all the military feats and milestones that Mai has over JD, JD has her beat in one horrible way. She is reminded by the way the orange washes over his olive skin.

"I have never been there when a planet is Glassed. Command always pulls me out before it gets that bad." She comments.

JD blinks a few times, nodding to himself. "I don't recommend it."

She laughs. She actually laughs. It's like a slip, or a break in her character, but she does as JD answers dryly, quickly, and he can't help but think about the last time they skipped rocks like this.

They really are different now, even with the two months difference.

It felt like a lifetime.

Still it's rather morbid that a joke has come out of something that has killed billions, and as soon as she lets her veil up, it is back down.

Of course, he doesn't recommend running for your life from literal hellfire, being the sole survivor as you throw yourself into a dark, pitch black cave and pray that the rumbling doesn't consume you. Though he can't fault anyone for laughing at a quip, let alone her.

The sun shines on her dusky skin, and he can't help but think how it makes her like honey at that very moment. They lock eyes, and the both of them have forgotten when they have transferred to sitting on the sandy beach as the water tickles their toes. "I am sorry I have not been around. It is difficult for me to be… out, in this city." She says, regretful.

He knows why, it's why he has refused to check behind him at all. It's why she hasn't faced that direction in hours. "Yeah. I figure. Though it's okay for now. Right? Just us here, after all."

It exhausts them, talking about the Covenant, knowing of the mistakes made and what they want to do. The dance they do between living a new life and fighting an old war is still there, eating at them, but at the end of the day it amounts to nothing but inner turmoil. They have their orders, both from Shepard, and above her.

Those orders culminate in them watching a sunset go down silently, getting washed over with the smell of salt and ocean and fresh air, sharing a cocktail.

It doesn't hit as hard for either of them, but for Mai, it's her first, real pleasant time taking to the drink. She is inside of herself, savoring the ebb and flow of her mind being hampered, knowing that, although it technically is poisoning, it is the recreational sort.

JD does just the same, his mild haze settling him well as the oranges of the sky turn to violets, and then to stars.

For Mai, this is what she imagines what shore leave should be.

They don't have to talk, they don't have to do anything, and although that might be insane to her as a Spartan, she finds it enjoyable with someone else. It's the first thing, she realizes, that she doesn't want to do alone.

They've been out at that beach silently for hours, the rocks having all been used for rock skipping and rock skipping attempts, the bottle well drained, before she speaks up again. Only the stars are above to light (as per Altis colony design for tourism purposes).

"JD, I am-" She cuts herself with the speed of pulling the trigger on an Elite's head. _JD, I am glad I met you._ She cannot say it though, because she feels a block in her throat and her gut tell her that this is submission for some unknown. She hates the unknown. The unknown is harder to kill, and she is good at killing. Her whole life is to just kill; anything else feels wrong.

JD looks at her with his complacently pleased face and the shine of the ambient light, the stars, seem to make his eyes glow. He cannot sign in the dark, so he speaks. "Huh?"

"I am cold." She says instead, and it's not at all true. She doesn't follow up however as JD shuffles and gathers up his jacket again, rubbing sand off, bridging the distance between him and her as he scoots his butt over.

"Put this on." It's her conditioning that make her take it like orders, staring at the puffy article in her hands and immediately approximate what it's like to put on a jacket. She's better at putting on her techsuit and armor than she is with actual clothes, but, like all things, she catches on as if her life depended on it. She puts on his jacket, one arm at a time, gentle not to break it with her form, but it sits on her well, and, more than it, it is her that is at hazard to break. For the overwhelming sense of wearing his jacket floods her nose, her skin, and she is no longer cold.

He smells like rain.

On New Jerusalem, the only time the city was cleaned was when it rained, and for at least a few minutes, a younger Mai and her mother were allowed to be free from the grime of their existence.

JD smelled like rain and she let it permeate over her. For a short time, reality is fuzzy, it's not hard, or grating, or asking her to fight. It's warm, and she feels for the first time in a long time, okay.

* * *

It's about midnight by the time they walk back to the city, sharing a delightful alcoholic haze between them. On the way back it's small, nothing conversations, just to keep themselves mentally there. JD doesn't mind the colder night breeze and Mai especially doesn't mind being wrapped in his jacket, so the walk they do isn't urgent, and if anything, it's meandering. It's in the middle of Mai stating what her preferred scope magnification is for most engagements that, on the streets of Altis that JD for once sees the threat before her.

It makes her hate vodka and coke so much in that instance as JD stops on the sidewalk and stares down it at a group going the opposite direction:

A typical Covenant fireteam, led by a Brute.

For Mai, Spartan Time kicks in, but it is muted, and she is confused. She doesn't care for the fact she has no armor on, or they don't have any weapons except for their omni-tools, assuming they had a blade module downloaded. Though it's a wash anyway: they're a fully armed squad. The Brute, wearing blue power armor, wields a grenade launcher in one hand as his other is limply at his side, the Grunt and Jackal procession armed with their usual outfitting of plasma pistols, rifles, and needlers. Why the Covenant is armed like this she wants to demand the next time she sees an Alliance officer, but she thinks there might not be a next time as sooner, rather than later, the Brute's squad comes up to them directly. It's not a patrol, but simply a Brute leading a labor group around. Grunts are dragging a anti-grav lift of fusion coils, probably to a Covenant prefab in the colony, however they have had the opportunity to pause as the Brute steps in front of the two humans.

They are alone on that street, just them and the Covenant.

The smell of a Brute is inescapable to the two soldiers. They know it so well; that musk, repugnant, like an animal. Getting this close meant many things to them, but not what was about to happen.

Through his helmet, the Brutes sniffs once or twice, looking at Mai specifically, red eyes darting between her and JD as they seem, to him, petrified.

It's not that however they feel: JD is horrified, and Mai is going insane.

JD is horrified because of what might happen, and all he can do is do what his mind tells him to do as his body, his survival instincts, is telling him to draw a gun that isn't there and find cover.

Cockily, the Brute growls, crossing his arms, talking to Mai. They speak the lingua franca, and hearing a Brute speak an understandable tongue fills the two former UNSC members with disgust. "You are tall, for a Human. Heh. Have you any fight in you?" It's a dare, a challenge. The Covenant hasn't fought in this galaxy ever since they arrived, and Brutes are born to fight.

To his question: So much. She has so much within her. The fight in Mai is the fight of over several thousand years of Human warrior culture and technological development, and she has used it to cave in the skulls of Brutes like him whole before, hundreds of times over. JD feels it the second he takes her hand urgently.

"We're just on our way back to our hotel." JD answered, shakily, putting on the voice of his native city. Simply: he sounded like an urbanite.

"Hmph. So quick to slink away. It makes me miss the Humans I know. _They always died well at least."_

It is JD's grip on her hand, entirely encompassing it as he would hold a weapon, that she concentrates on. She knows why he did it, and she is thankful as he begins to drag her. Her feet don't get quite the message as her body pivots and she tumbles in his direction as, evidently, the Brutes and Grunts notice this and begin chortle among themselves.

She sees it in her head as she burned her vision through the Brute, and, before she fully steps away, she swears the Brute sees in her that she is not just any Human.

As fast as they came, they have disappeared, moving past them around the corner, and the two of them are panting in an alley they have stumbled into together. JD has not let go over her hand, but even if he wanted to, he doesn't know if he could. White knuckled grip meant to keeping his weapon on him amidst explosions and drops instead hold onto Mai.

It comes through her like glass breaking as she keels over and vomits onto the ground, and JD has never seen Mai collapse as she does, holding onto her knees as his hand finally lets go and her head leans against steel wall.

She is breathing through her teeth, like a monster. She has been denied her one purpose and she is furious.

"I could've killed them all, so easy." Her teeth grind.

"I know." JD reckons, and he is sober.

"I should've."

"I know."

"But…. But…." She can't.

"I know." JD says one final time. His hand is on her back, and she feels the pressure in between her shoulder blades. She concentrates it. She concentrates it and the reassuring pressure instead of the vile bile in her mouth she continues to spit out into an ugly puddle on the ground; she concentrates on it instead of the vision of her goring Covenant alive with her bear hands, ripping and tearing flesh until she sees nothing but bone and blood and dead enemies.

"Mai?" She concentrates on his voice, and she knows he deserves this:

"I am glad you are here, JD." She can't even hear her own voice as her mind battles between being in combat, and not being in combat; the want to be fight and the fight to not do that. Though she sees his face, his eyes, widen once, and he smiles when she turns her head at him.

He's glad that she hasn't become a Spartan that very moment. He's glad that she hasn't summoned her Spartan armor, molting it like a creature. He's glad that she hasn't started a galactic incident. Most of all, however, he's happy she said that.

Would the Mai he first met ever be able to say something like that? He knows: no.

He's just sorry that it had come out like this: in some dank alleyway, where her nerves and urges have manifested in vomit on the ground.

Though it's one step at a time, and he knows that this isn't his first shore leave where someone has spilled their guts like this.

His hands come up and out again, and the part of her mind that she has dedicated to sign language kicks on. Instead of sign language however, it's another form of communication that comes from him, tapping her shoulder with a thumbs up, head tilted: It's a Spartan sign.

YOU GOOD?

She is now.


End file.
